SQL Musings

The blog has moved

2011-01-12T12:41:00.001-08:00

I decided to give Wordpress a try, so the blog has moved to: www.voiceofthedba.com

CTRL Scroll and Getting Old

2011-01-10T08:51:00.000-08:00

The handiest thing that I’ve used lately for a computer is the Ctrl button and the scroll wheel on my mouse. If you’ve never tried it, do it now on this web page. Scroll different directions and you’ll see what I mean.

Here’s the default view of my blog:

It’s not bad, and from about 2, 2.5 ft away, I can read this. However if I CTRL and scroll up a couple clicks, I get this:

Not a huge difference in the images, but much easier to read.

As I get older it gets harder to read images on the screen, especially when I’m trying to get a lot done. It’s easy to scroll down, but I was finding myself scooting forward on my chair and leaning in. Not the best ergonomics. So I sat back (in my new chair), and made all my fonts bigger. I upped the default sizes in Word, OneNote, EditPlus, etc.

Getting old is hard, but technology makes this easier. I even run a larger font in my Kindle apps than I Delaney because it’s just easier to read.

And more fun than browsing the limited supply of large print books at the library.

Thinking about goals for 2011

2011-01-10T04:33:00.000-08:00

The SQL community is inspiring, and there are a lot of people that work hard to contribute to it. With all the efforts (I hesitate to use the word “competition”), it inspires others to try harder and do more. It’s no wonder we have a huge number of SQL Server MVPs, well over 200.

I’ve somewhat gotten trapped in the “I should do more” mentality, spurred on by my talks with Andy Warren (LinkedIn | Blog | @sqlandy) and his efforts, reading about all the events others go to, seeing the regular blogs, tweets, and Facebook posts about user group meetings. However as I look forward to 2011, I realize that I can’t “compete” with others, and I can’t necessarily do more.

I do feel the need to give back to others. This community has given me a great career, and I would like to do what I can to help others. That’s the “Purpose” part of Drive that I think we all need. At this point in my life, the purpose seems to be more important to me than it has been in the past.

But life is busy. As I think about 2011, I want to do more SQL Saturdays, make more of a commitment to the local user groups (3 in CO), try to grow beyond SQL and teach/talk to the .NET and Windows groups, maybe reach some college kids and help them prepare for the workforce.

I can’t do it all. I need to step back and focus on what is effective, efficient, and doable. I want to get some goals that make sense for this point in my career, realizing that I can only do so much and still take care of my family.

I’ve committed to 4 SQL Saturdays and 1 other local event. As much as I’d like to go back to a few places, I realize that I need to hit some new events. Please feel free to ask me to come to your event, and I will consider it, but remember that I cannot travel every weekend. I will keep invitations in mind, and I have a queue of places that I could not make in the past, but will try to get to in the future. Chicago and Dallas didn’t make 2010, but they are on my 2011 list. My apologies to Malathi in Louisville for missing that city, but they will have top priority in the future. Columbia has sadly conflicted every time with me, but I will get down there to see Brian one of these years.

As things stand now, I am thinking that some of the conferences are going to be out for me because of the stress that travel places on the family. Or at least my time will be cut down. I only spent two days at TechEd last year, and it’s possible that I might do the same for more conferences this year.

Other goals are working on the MCM written test for now. That’s my SQL Server goal and while I don’t think this is the year for me to take the lab, I think the exposure to the process and the effort to learn more about SQL Server is well spent.

A lot of words above to say I don’t know what I should do 10 days into Jan, but this week will hopefully allow me to focus on getting more specific items down.

Windows Experience on W510

2011-01-07T15:54:00.001-08:00

I toyed with the idea of using the SSD for my main drive, but I’d really like to get the VMs running quicker and in the end decided to use that as my secondary, as the location for the VHD and VDI files.

As a result, my Windows Experience Index is only 5.9, as shown below:

The reason? The disk transfer rate from my primary drive is the lowest score. If I had used the SSD, I’m sure I’d have a 6.4 score or better. I’m not 100% positive I have the best driver for video on my machine, but since I don’t game, and primarily write here, I won’t worry about it. The CPU and memory scores are pretty good.

I downloaded Geekbench as well, and ran that.

As a note, this is a Lenovo W510 that is about a year old. I upgraded to 16GB of RAM recently, but here are the specs I note:

Core i7 CPU Q720, 1.6GHz
16GB RAM
500GB SATA 5400rpm drive
80GB Intel SSD

Overall, it seems snappier. I'll get some VMs running and see how those perform.

The laptop rebuild continues

2011-01-07T09:53:00.001-08:00

Not done yet, but I have been slowly patching and installing software over the last few evenings, stuck at my desk most days. It’s amazing how little software I have on DVD, and how little I need. Once I got Win 7 installed, I needed to grab the wireless driver from Lenovo, and since then I have been installing from the HDD.

I mentioned on Twitter the other day that I didn’t like Office 2010, and was going to go with 2007 again, but I then realized that I should install SQL 2008 R2 since I’ll demo stuff. Then I realized that I need Office 2010 for Powerpivot.

@##@$%$%$@#@

It’s mostly Outlook, and I should blog about that separately.

In any case, most of the software I need is back on the machine. I did decide to try Chrome (haven’t installed FF at all). However I have my Edit Plus, Password Safe, and Live Mesh working.

Once SQL finishes installing, I should be good to go.

Rebuilding the W510 - DVD Driver Issues with x64

2011-01-05T18:22:00.000-08:00

I backed up my machine, copied a bunch of data to both a thumb drive as well as the second hard drive on my W510, and get ready to install Windows 7 x64.

First I had to add memory. I had put 8GB in the bottom slot, but to replace the 4GB with 8GB in the top slots, I had to remove the keyboard. It's actually easy, unscrew two screws (all the way out), pop out the keyboard, and then replace memory. The underneath slot is hard to reach, but it only took me about 5 minutes to upgrade to 16GB.

Now time for Windows. Nervously I put the x64 image in the DVD drive (replacing it in the 2nd bay) and booting. Windows setup loaded and started and....

Stopped. No DVD driver found. Slightly amusing to me since I had booted from the DVD drive. I tried again, and then went downstairs to search the 'net. I found a few references but no drivers. The drivers on the Lenovo site were an install, which won't work during setup. I downloaded Intel drivers, but those didn't work. To top it off, my laptop was now not booting into the old Windows, saying I needed to run repair. I suspect setup has some boot files there, but now I was really nervous.

I read on a Lenovo forum that someone had a similar issue and fixed it with a new .iso download. So I burned a new Windows x64 DVD from MSDN and tried that. Success!!

Now the install is running and my fingers are crossed. We'll see how well this works.

MCM Prep - Sliding the test

2011-01-04T10:15:00.001-08:00

If you can’t cram enough for the test, what’s the thing to do? Slide the test. I realized last night that I was scheduled for this Friday, but I’m nowhere near prepared. Not that I’ll be totally prepared, but I’d like to be well prepared in my mind and I haven’t gotten through all modules.

I did XML last night, and realized I’m a little lost. The CLR I did today made sense, but I decided to give myself more time. So I moved it to late February, after vacation, where I think I’ll do some prep as well with all the flights and laying around the pool time. It will be good to keep the mind moving while I’m in the Bahamas.

MCM Prep - Only ONE Transaction Log File

2011-01-04T03:28:00.000-08:00

Unlike for data files, SQL Server does not use multiple files for the transaction log in any way that improves performance. The writes are not striped across files. Instead SQL Server will write to one file, then the next, then the next, wrapping to the first file when all the VLFs are full, just as it would with one file. In other words, it moves sequentially through the files for new transactions.

I haven’t found a BOL reference for this, and don’t really feel like continuing the search, but Kim Tripp blogs about it here and it’s mentioned in the log file internals MCM video.

MVP 2011

2011-01-03T07:53:00.001-08:00

I was awarded the MVP status from Microsoft for 2011 on Jan 1, 2011. This is my fourth consecutive award and I am honored to be recognized for my efforts in the SQL Server community.
When I opened the email last Saturday morning, I had mixed feelings. On one hand I think I deserve the award for my efforts in the community in speaking, writing, and promoting SQL Server. I think I do a lot, and while it’s my job, it’s also a bit of a passion for me.
On the other hand, I always think “what was Microsoft thinking” when I consider the deep technical knowledge that so many of the MVPs display. I know a lot about SQL Server, but it’s in a fairly shallow, general knowledge area, though I do have a lot of experience in the past. I don’t do any earth-shaking work, and I certainly don’t impress many of the experts in various areas of SQL Server work. So in some sense I didn’t really contribute a lot to the growth of the knowledge base of SQL Server in 2010.
The award, however, is very much a community award, and it is for the contributions in sharing knowledge and helping others work with SQL Server. Without the award, I wouldn’t do anything different. This doesn’t drive me, and if I lose it, it won’t change the way I approach the community.

Back to Work

2011-01-03T07:17:00.000-08:00

It's actually nice to be back to work. It's been a great holiday season for me, lots of family time and un-wired time, but I'm ready to get back to my routine and learning some SQL. There was a severe lack of studying over the last week, however with relatives in town, that's the way it goes.

Time to get back on my MCM prep schedule.

Quick MCM Prep Help

2010-12-31T05:24:00.000-08:00

Before I went on vacation, I mentioned I was downloading some of the MCM videos from Technet.I had grabbed 4 or 5 before I left, dropping the MP3s on my iPhone, and I listened to a few of them on the drive to Steamboat Springs.

That worked out so well, while I was on vacation, I tweeted that I was downloading more MP3s for the ride home, but Aaron Nelson (blog | @sqlvariant) sent me a script he was working on to automatically download them. I finally got around to trying it when I returned to get the video formats of the videos (some are demos) and after a little mucking around with paths, I got it to work.

It's a great script that runs from Windows Powershell, and you can get it from Aaron's blog. Even if you don't want to take the MCM test, watch the videos. Lots to learn in there.

MCM Prep - VLF Allocations

2010-12-30T04:20:00.000-08:00

I had heard that you could have too many VLFs in your transaction log, and it could cause performance issues. Kimberly Tripp has a great blog on how to get better performance from your log, but until I was studying for the MCM, I didn’t realize you could have too few.

The issue seems to be that if you allocate too much transaction log at once, you could end up with a few, very, very large (GB in size) VLFs, and despite regular log backups, you could not be clearing any VLFs inside the log until there are no active transactions in that VLF. And that could cause a performance slowdown as it clears that large VLF.

How are VLFs allocated? Here’s the formula:

chunks less than 64MB = 4 VLFs
chunks of 64MB and less than 1GB = 8 VLFs
chunks of 1GB and larger = 16 VLFs

This is from : http://www.sqlskills.com/BLOGS/KIMBERLY/post/Transaction-Log-VLFs-too-many-or-too-few.aspx#ixzz19KysnYcK

So if you need 50GB of log space, do as Kim recommends and get 512MB chunks by allocating 8GB at a time. You can do this contiguously, as in all the same day, but allocate 8GB, let it finish, then ALTER to add 8GB more, repeat until you reach the correct size.

Looking Back at 2010–Goal Review

2010-12-29T15:31:00.001-08:00

I had 8 goals for 2010, which I posted at the end of last year. That reminds me, I need to work on goals for 2011

These were a variety of work, community, and professional goals that I set with, thinking that I would be able to achieve these in the year. As with many things, I was wrong and didn’t end up I the place that I expected. Some of this was due to my poor time management, some due to changing situations, and some due to a changing of my feelings towards the end result of these goals. Here are my final comments on the goals:

Forums – My original goal was to post less, but keep 300 posts a month average. About 40-50 of those are set (editorials, handling issues), so it’s really a 200+ technical posting. I managed to make that average, with a wildly varying level per month.
Blogging – I wanted to blog 5 times a week, each week, with at least 2 being technical. I think I made this, outside of vacations, and most weeks I did manage to get a couple technical posts. In some ways, I think this is an artificial goal that forced me to look for technical items, but it also resulted in some less than stellar posts. I think I need to re-examine what I am trying to accomplish here for 2011.
Learn Reporting Services – Fail. I was hoping to devote 1-2 hours a week, a fairly small goal, to this. However besides getting this setup no 3 machines, building some basic reports, and fighting through non-domain security issues, I didn’t accomplish a lot here. Part of the issue is that I had no focus on “what” I wanted to do with SSRS and no work to produce. I think this was my learning goal for SQL Server, but it wasn’t well focused or developed. While I think these are good skills, and worth learning, it wasn’t a good choice for me. In short, a bad goal to pick, and one that was easy to let go as my life became busy.
Attend one SQL Saturday – A huge success, and I actually attended 7, along with a couple other events. I spoke at:

SQL Saturday #33 – Charlotte
SQL Saturday #22 – Pensacola
SQL Saturday #28 – Baton Rouge
SQL Saturday #52 – Colorado
SQL Saturday #53 – Kansas City
SQL Saturday #59 – New York City

Write a book – I made progress here, devoting a few afternoons here and actually working on two separate items at the same time. However what ended up killing me here is no enough of a focused effort, enough times. If I had spent 15-20 days on this, it would be done. I think that I moved some of this time to speaking events, and building presentations.
Build 2 new presentations – I actually built 3 this year. Two on basic SQL Server (one non-technical, one technical), and one on Common SQL Server Mistakes. I have another in progress that I want to get ready for 2011. Again, need to make focused time.
Take all my vacation in 2010 – Close. I didn’t make it, and again, work is interfering with my ski-Thursdays this winter. However I did manage to get in 4 vacations this year: St Martin, Las Vegas, Winter Park, and Steamboat Springs. I’ll call this a success, assuming I can free up 3 days each month in Jan/Feb/Mar.
Travel to one new city for work – Charlotte, Kansas City, Las Vegas, New York (for SSC) were new trips for me. It was good to me to visit with people outside of the areas I have tended to go (Seattle/Orlando) over the years.

So was it a successful year? It’s hard to say. It certainly was a busy one, and that impacted some of my personal goals. I think that overall I did well, and some of my failings were a lack of a well-focused goal.

In 2011, I want to look for goals that produce some result, and not arbitrary goals like blog every day. I am looking to better define a goal that will make my career grow, as well as contribute in a positive way to the community for SQL Server.

Getting a Dedicated Admin Connection

2010-12-28T04:51:00.000-08:00

Did you know you can easily get a Dedicated Admin Connection (DAC) in SSMS? I didn’t assuming that I’d need to use a command line and SQLCMD. However while studying for the MCM, I learned that there’s an easy way.

I tested this on a SQL Server 2008 instance, having a normal connection, as seen in the lower status bar:

Right click in the query window, and select “Change Connection”. In the dialog, not add “Admin:” before the server name, as shown below.

When you connect, you’ll have an admin connection, which you can see in the status bar.

Pretty cool.

Rebuilding my laptop

2010-12-27T12:56:00.001-08:00

I finally got around to adding the new memory (16GB), removing the old 4GB and then replacing the DVD drive with an SSD. Now he hard part: rebuilding the machine.

In order to use the 16GB, and get VMs to run more smoothly, I need 64 bit Windows 7. I had left the x86 install when I received it since I was worried about my Google calendar sync, and at the time I had a few 32 bit programs that didn’t work well with my 64 bit desktop.

Almost a year later things are fairly smooth on the desktop, and since I plan on doing more presenting, and more VM work, I need to take advantage of the RAM. Which means a rebuild.

First step is to back up my machine, which I’m doing now using my Windows Home Server. The next step is to then clone my drive to be safe, and finally I’ll do a reinstall of Windows and begin setting everything back up.

The Twelve Days of (SQL) Christmas

2010-12-27T09:55:00.001-08:00

Once upon a time a group of twelve bloggers agreed to each pick a post (or posts) they found interesting from the previous year, blog about them, comment, and call attention to them. I was tapped to summarize things, and here we go.

On the twelfth day of Christmas Stuart gave to me, the ghosts of SQL Christmas past, present, and future to read. (A few posts that remind us blogging is a great way to save code)

On the eleventh day of Christmas Mike Walsh gave to me, a post that I’d like to read to thee. (It’s a great one, well written, and enjoyable on backups)

On the tenth day of Christmas Chrys Manson gave to me, a reason the transaction log we need… (OK, a bad rhyme, but a great look at why the log is required)

On the ninth day of Christmas Kendra Little gave to me, a deep dive into locks that we can’t see (a look at shared locks, or those missing locks)

On the eighth day of Christmas Karen Lopez gave to me, the rules of design that so many don’t seem to read (over normalization, is it possible?)

On the seventh day of Christmas Yanni Robel gave to us, a reminder of all changes we must not trust (production needs to be controlled)

On the sixth day of Christmas Tim Ford gave to me, the advice that I need to learn to heed. (listening is a skill we can all improve)

On the fifth day of Christmas Erin Stellato gave to me, a series that teaches parallels in threes. (a great series on parallelism from Adam Machanic)

On the fourth day of Christmas Andy Leonard gave to me, a look forward to what SSIS really needs. (Denali SSIS parameters)

On the third day of Christmas Dave Stein gave to us, a post that covers SSIS over lunch. (Todd McDermid looks at SSIS)

On the second day of Christmas Grant Fritchey gave to me, a way to execute Powershell from the lee. (remoting with Powershell)

On the first day of Christmas Jeremiah Peschka gave to me, a way to find a table lost at sea (or in this case, you’ve deleted it).

It has been a wonderful year for blogging, speaking, and the general sharing of information with others. The SQL community seems to be unlike any other technical community, much more willing to share, help, and work with each other in a way that reminds me of an extended family. It is wonderful to be a part of this community, and I look forward to an even great 2011.

Happy Holidays and don’t forget to set some goals for the next year, and maybe become a part of the 12 days in 2011.

The MCM Journey

2010-12-27T04:52:00.000-08:00

I’m not really planning on getting the MCM. Perhaps I’ll change my mind, but it’s not the time for me to do it. I’m not consulting, and not planning on doing it anytime soon. If I studied enough to pass the lab, likely my skills would atrophy without some real work. At this point in my life, I don’t have the time for getting real work.

Actually, I don’t have the time for real studying, either. However MVPs have the chance to take the written exam for free, instead of $500, and I can’t really justify passing up this opportunity. I scheduled it in January, and last week started studying by downloading some of the MCM Readiness videos from SQL Skills.

I’ve been slowly starting to watch them, and I realize how much I don’t know about SQL Server as I go through them. It’s not all bad news as I also realize how much I do know in terms of general concepts and understanding of how the pieces and parts work.

I don’t expect to pass, especially after seeing that someone like Jason Strate didn’t on his first try, but this is a good chance for me to focus on a task and also to get an idea of where I stand.

And the winners are….. (iPads for Christmas contest)

2010-12-20T07:00:00.000-08:00

Congratulations to the following winners of our iPads for Christmas contest. It was a hard choice, but I ended up with these winners:

CC-597066
DataChomp
Scott Murray-240410
richardn-1128243
Michael Lysons
chris.cantley
Nick Van Dyk
barb.wendling
hghumphrey
MdApache

I had over a 100 entries to go through, and it took some time, and a few passes to get down to about 20, then 14, then pick the last 10. These were interesting entries, and while it was close, these seemed to stand out in my mind.

I’ll be contacting the winners today, and then letting Red Gate know as well and we’ll get those iPad shipments moving.

Thanks to everyone that entered, and happy holidays to you all.

Holiday

2010-12-20T04:16:00.000-08:00

As my employer (Red Gate) puts it. The blog is shutting down for a few days as my family and I enjoy a few days I Steamboat Springs before Christmas. As of Saturday night, we should be in the Western side of Colorado, skiing until Thursday. We’ll return for Christmas at home, but likely I won’t be back at work until Monday the 27th.

Happy Holidays to everyone.

How not to ask for help

2010-12-17T16:07:00.001-08:00

you can help me for the visule studio 2005 programe I have assigment
I do not how to use for these program
you can help me plase

That’s literally the text of an email that came to me at SQLServerCentral. Apart from the language barriers and issues, it is the type of frustrating email that I don’t really like to see on a Friday afternoon. It’s a waste of my time to read it, even if I delete it.

T-SQL Tuesday #13 Roundup

2010-12-17T01:39:00.000-08:00

After my call for “What the Business Says Is Not What the Business Wants”, there were quite a few people that responded. Including my blog post, I found 43 comments posted on with links back to the thoughts.

Here’s a quick summary, along with a short comment on each.

Matt Whitfield wrote on issues with letting the customer decide how, in addition to what, a project should be built. Wise words, and often a place where trouble ensues when technical people take things literally. A great cartoon to start out the topic is in this post as well.

Rob Farley talks collation issues. In this case, the collation issues are misunderstandings due to the different way we express ourselves in our particular industry or career. It’s a common problem, and it shows why the technical people need to make very, very sure they understand what the business person said, not what they meant.

Mark Broadbent stresses that we need to provide alternative solutions when what is proposed won’t work, and talk in terms of value, something the “business” should understand.

Roger Noble wants to take off the white coat and tells us to remember that communication is the key. On both sides.

Aaron Bertrand has seen issues with outsourcing and requirements. This technique works well in some cases, but not others, and with development projects, it can be problematic.

Reporting is the area where Jason Brimhall has found confusion in different departments wanting separate reports, but then somehow having them match for comparison purposes.

Performance is always an issue, and Alexander Kuznetsov talks about the need to actually define carefully what types of performance, and what the metrics we use, will mean.

I have horses, well, my wife has horses. I love my wife, so there are horses at the ranch. Noel McKinney asks what to do with the business wants a pony? Not literally a pony, but worth the ready anyway to understand what he means.

Shrinking Databases is the scenario that Pinal Dave uses for his post. He describes a scenario where the business requested that the smallest file be used for DR, but a lack of understanding of how backups worked resulted in a regular shrink job.

Nicholas Cain talks about this mysterious business, and has a few examples of the problems that can be caused when too much design input comes from non-technical people.

Chris Shaw channels the Soup Nazi in a quick note about a former manager who wants the database locked down, to everyone but him.

Jen McCown starts with a classic joke and gives a few examples of where the business has caused issues with technical systems.

John Sansom, DBA from across the pond, has some advice for DBAs on how to better develop understanding with your business people as well as understand politics a little better yourself.

Bradley Ball tells a story of how he has had to build trust with the business. A story similar to one I’ve had, and worth the read to remind you how to deal with mistakes.

Joshua Feierman wonders how we can better build good software the meets the business’ needs, budget, and timelines. I can sympathize here, but also understand that the business wants things done, and not necessarily in the best way possible.

Bob Pusateri describes the problems that come when the business has a little knowledge and tries to work too closely with technical people.

Matt Velic reminds us to listen to the business and ask questions to be sure that the communication is understood by both sides. A good reminder that ultimately this is a job and you shouldn’t get too upset.

Jeremiah Peschka tells us to listen in a not-so-subtle way. Listening, and understanding, what users say to you is important. We shouldn’t design the software we want, we should design the software users want. Not as easy as it sounds.

Gethyn Ellis, one of SQLServerCentral regular bloggers, runs into the classic Full-Recovery-Mode-with-No-Transaction-Log-Backups.

Mike Walsh tells us we need to listen. And tells us again. And again. Get the hint? We (IT people) don’t listen well.

Erin Stellato uses quotes to remind us that teamwork and relationships are important.

Kendra Little talks features. What people want, but what they then forget or don’t consider. This is a nice post to send to your business people, or perhaps paraphrase to try and help them understand your point of view.

My good friend, Andy Leonard, talks ego, as a part of his series on interactions with business people. Check your ego. Good advice.

Audrey Hammons has a top 5 list. These are the top five things the business has asked for. It’s a funny list.

The very talented Wendy Pastrick from Chicago found some nice blog fodder with this month’s topic. Is your business like the blind men describing the elephant? If so, you might like Wendy’s post.

Jason Bacani uses some great images to show why the business has trouble with us. They want everything yesterday and we want our procedures to get in the way.

Richard Handloff tells us how to ask questions to get better information from the business.

Meredith Ryan-Smith gives us a method that has worked well for groups in her cmpany.

Cade Roux tells us that IT needs to be a strong partner with the rest of the business.

John Welch has to convince the business of the value of data quality. I’ve fought this battle before as well and it’s a tough one.

Amit Benjeree writes his second T-SQL post and talks about the classic things you need: requirements and priorities.

Allen Kinsel tells us to plan on changing. It’s a lesson I learned early, and not only do I plan for change, I design with the idea that my design will need to change for future requirements.

Jes Borland learned about the business and learned just how valuable that knowledge can be.

SQL Soldier, Robert Davis, warns us of the dangers when the DBA does not push back on business demands.

Brian Kelley, longtime SQLServerCentral author and security expert, reminds us that technical people and business people start from different places. Neither knows what the other knows, and that can be a source of problems.

Thomas Rushton left a job when the business didn’t appreciate the value of people. I’m sure he’s glad he’s not at that job anymore.

Ryan Adams says that we need to be the interpreters. DBAs have to translate what is said into what is needed. Now if we just had a decent piece of software to help us, this would be easy. Ryan has a good example of a situation where things can get confused without someone acting as interpreter.

Oscar Zamora talks about the importance of a strong business analyst in the software development process.

Stacia Misner rounds out this months’ party with “a picture worth a thousand words” and gives us some insight into how she designs systems and works through projects. Rather than go left to right, she goes right to left. Read her post to understand more.

This was a neat experience, but a lot of work. I’ll admit that I don’t always read that many T-SQL Tuesday posts. I tend to read 5-10 tops, and going through 40 and summarizing was hard.

However I’m glad I did it, and I bet you will too. Contact Adam to host a month in 2011 and pick your topic.

Denver SQL Server User Group Holiday Party

2010-12-16T19:29:00.001-08:00

Tonight was the 2010 Denver SQL Server User group party. I typically haven’t done in the past to the holiday meetings since they aren’t usually well attended, and time is vey valuable. However this year the meeting was being held at a local bowling alley, and I decided to go.

It started early, at 5, and attendance was sparse at first, but by 6 we had about 20 or so people there. It was a mixed group, and a number of people I didn’t know. I didn’t bowl, mostly because throwing that ball hurts my fingers, but also because I’m not good and wanted to network more.

A couple hours of time for me, the chance to catch up with people I haven’t seen since our SQL Saturday, and little SQL talk. This was definitely one of the better holiday parties I’ve attended in the past.

Of course, being a geek, I listened to Paul Randal talk Backups and CheckDB on the ride over and back.

Insert_Identity Permissions

2010-12-16T03:55:00.000-08:00

Despite my joking with Aaron Bertrand on Twitter that his suggestion on Connect got voted down because he’s Canadian, I think he has a great point with a hole in Books Online. He wrote a nice blog on the item, and it’s one you ought to consider voting up if you agree.

I voted it up, and I think this is the type of half-*ssed documentation that is strewn throughout Books Online. While it’s a great document, and has a lot of information, it’s not always clear what is meant, and there are often holes. Most items have permissions listed, but not all, and even those that do are not clearly written or even correct.

In my mind, the ability to change the identity values on a table ought to be either explicitly a permission that is given to users (GRANT IDENTITY_INSERT on xx to yy) or it ought to be included with the INSERT permission. There isn’t really anything here that’s altering a schema. It’s an insert permission for a user, that explicitly needs to put in a value, perhaps to close a sequence, or fix a failed insert. There’s no reason to require any elevated permission for this action.

In any case, having the documentation clearer, even if it doesn’t behave as I’d expect it, is something I think is worth voting for.

Thanksgiving Bloopers

2010-12-15T11:21:00.000-08:00

I'm slow to get this out, but I finally rendered the raw bloopers from November. Enjoy.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Busy Week

2010-12-14T14:55:00.001-08:00

It’s going to be a busy week for me. At last count, I had over 40 comments for my T-SQL Tuesday party. Most of them are of a decent length, and I need to get through them all to write a summary.

I’m hoping to get it done for Friday, but no promises right now.

T-SQL Tuesday #13– The Business and Disaster Recovery

2010-12-14T14:27:00.000-08:00

I’m hosting this month’s T-SQL Tuesday blog party, but that doesn’t mean I can’t participate. I posted the invitation last week, and hopefully we’ll have a large number of people participating today.

The Cost of HADR

I’ve dealt with a lot of business people over the years, and for a variety of reasons. At one job, I worked for a small company, literally about 50 people, and we had a number of systems critical to our business. We had a large fax server, receiving hundreds of faxes a day from overseas. We had a large imaging server/platform in which we stored our faxes along with quite a bit of other business correspondence that we needed a record of, and we had an inventory management/sales system running on SQL Server that people used every day to run the business.

These were all important systems, and if they were down, business would slow to a crawl. The owner of the company wanted to take advantage of all our technology and mandated “no downtime” and “zero data loss” to my boss, the VP of sales for the company. He was, of course, happy to push this down to me as a goal for the next year.

This was in 1997, and as I investigated our possibilities for achieving this, I realized very quickly that it wasn’t a good move for the company. Clustering in SQL Server v6.5 was shaky and hard to install and maintain. Marathon Technologies had a machine that was basically a “cluster-in-box” that would do a lot of what we wanted, but it would have been around a $30k server. Since our two SQL Servers cost about $7k together, this didn’t seem like a great solution to me.

Instead I investigated what downtime cost us. What would it cost in terms of work and salary if we had to re-enter data that might be lost. We had been down for various periods of time due to different events, and the business had survived, even one day when we were shut completely down for 2 days.

It quickly came to light that we’d have to be down for over a week to really cost the business more than $30k, and that was debatable. We could still conduct lots of work on paper and over the phone, so it didn’t make sense to aim for zero data loss and zero downtime. I explained it to my boss, laid out a simple case for him with a few numbers highlighted, and the provided an alternative for investment in a little redundancy, designed to minimize losses, but not prevent them.

In the end the big boss agreed. He hadn’t really meant zero loss, after all, anyone in business knows that there are always going to be some losses. What he wanted was his business to keep running, cost effectively. That’s what we gave him at a much more reasonable price.

iPads for Christmas

2010-12-13T07:29:00.000-08:00

There's a contest going on, today through Friday, and you can win a copy of SQL Monitor from my employer Red Gate Software.

Oh yeah, in order to use your new software like we do at SQLServerCentral, we'll send you an iPad as well. A 16GB, 3G, iPad.

You can read about the contest in today's editorial.

SQL Server 2005 SP4

2010-12-13T06:16:00.000-08:00

Last year I submitted a Connect item for SQL Server 2005 SP4. Quite a few people supported this item and voted for it, and Microsoft decided to build this last, final Service Pack for SQL Server 2005.

No timeline was given, but last week someone noticed that my Connect item had been changed to “closed” status, which to me is an indication that the Service Pack is getting close to being finished. I have no idea when this might be released, but I am guessing since we just passed the five year anniversary of the release of SQL Server 2005, it will be soon. I am sure Microsoft would like to get this finished, and move more people out of SQL Server 2005 support and into supporting newer products.

There are lots of people that run SQL Server 2005 instances. Actually I think there are lots of people still running SQL Server 2000 instances as well. These are mature products, and I understand that need to stop bug fixes for these products as time marches on. However I also think that we ought to finalize the products with a final rollup of the CUs and patches that is tested and deployable.

Not everyone can, or wants to upgrade, and the customers that did pay for those products deserve to have a full lifecycle of support. Which can be up to ten years after the original release of the product.

SQL Saturday #45 Cancelled

2010-12-10T13:23:00.001-08:00

I hate not living up to commitments. It really, really bothers me and I have tried hard in my career to under-promise and over-deliver. However I’m going to get a big fat #FAIL for SQL Saturday #45.

I found out last night that my son has his black belt test scheduled for Jan 22, 2011. That’s the same day as SQL Saturday #45 in Louisville, KY, an event that I have been planning on attending for a few months. I tried to get the test moved, but our karate school only does black belt testing twice a year, and they bring in another teacher from out of town to help, so I was stuck. I had been thinking it would be Jan 29, since that’s usually when other tests occur, but that wasn’t the case this time.

So I sent a note with apologies and regret to the organizers as well as Red Gate since I was supposed to represent them there. I did find a few people that were willing to speak and take my place, so I think the event will be fine, but I still feel bad about cancelling.

I’m glad that I went to class since this was the first I’d heard of it and it gave me some notice. With only a week left before I go on holiday, I’d gate to have missed this news until Jan.

The 2011 SQL Saturday Schedule is Filling Up

2010-12-10T03:45:00.000-08:00

I have been trying to figure out where to go in 2011 for SQL Saturdays, especially as Red Gate is looking to have me do a few more demos and sessions at events. It seemed that there were relatively few events, and I’d already decided on these two:

SQL Saturday #60 - Cleveland

I’ve never been to these cities, but I have a relative in one, and a number of friends in another. So I decided to skip Tampa (they have lots of speakers) and Houston (can’t travel two weekends in a row) and hit those.
So when I saw the announcement of SQL Saturday #71 from Grant Fritchey (Blog | @gfritchey), I thought “cool, another event.” Then I saw the date: Apr 2.
:(
That’s the same day as SQLSaturday #63 in Dallas, and I’d already submitted a session as well as semi-committed to the organizers there. So it looks like I’ll miss Boston, which is a little disappointing. I like that city.
As I checked thhttp://www.sqlsaturday.com/default.aspxe schedule, I saw a few other conflicts as well. I have somewhat committed to Chicago (#67, Mar 26), which is right before Dallas. A busy time for me, and with Tech Ed and the Rally before that, I’m going to have to limit some travel. Right now I’m thinking to skip TechEd since it’s not the best show for me to go to anyway.
However Columbia is getting ready for another event on Mar 19 (SQL Saturday #70). If I went there, I’d be gone 3 weeks in a row, which is a lot. Actually it’s too much, both on the family and me, so I’ll have to miss Columbia again.
However it’s good for the community. Already there are:

Jan - 3 events
Feb - 4 events
Mar - 3 events
Apr - 3 events
Aug - 1 event

I’m sure more are coming, and I will really, really try to get to new cities next year and meet more of the SQLServerCentral community.

Put Your Thinking Caps On

2010-12-08T07:16:00.001-08:00

A repost from SQLServerCentral.
What would you like for Christmas?

Hint, hint, a little visual imagery of the kind of prize that you just might win from Red Gate software next week. And just in time for Christmas!

To celebrate the release of SQL Monitor, Red Gate is letting me give away 10 iPads along with 10 licenses of SQL Monitor to 10 lucky winners. But it's not just me, there are a few others that get to give away prizes as well. Anyone know this guy?

or these guys?

All three of us will be giving away 10 iPad/SQL Monitor combos next week. Each of us will be running a separate contest, with separate ideas, that will give you the chance to win an iPad. Keep an eye on the daily editorial for Steve's contest, BrentOzar.com for Brent's, and ScaryDBA.com for Grant's.
You can only enter one contest, so don't enter too quickly. Put some thought into your one and only chance for a Christmas iPad. The standard rules will apply (no family, employees, etc) and will be posted on each site Monday.
A few hints for you to think about: SQL Monitor (of course), life balance, traveling far away, and synergy.
Good luck!

T-SQL Tuesday #13 - What the Business Says Is Not What the Business Wants

2010-12-07T03:48:00.000-08:00

It’s time to wrap up T-SQL Tuesday for the year 2010 and I was invited to host his month’s blog party by Adam Machanic (Blog | Twitter).

What’s T-SQL Tuesday?

This monthly event is the brainchild of Adam, and you can read about the inspiration in his very first T-SQL Tuesday post. Adam Machanic , a long time SQL Server MVP came up with an excellent idea of improving community involvement around blogging where bloggers around the world post their views on a same topic chosen by the host on the 2nd Tuesday of every month. If you are interested in hosting an event like this and then send a note to Adam.

What are the rules?

1. Since this is a global event, your post should go live between 2010/12/14 00:00:00.000 GMT (2nd Tuesday) and 2010/12/15 00:00:00.000 GMT. Since those of us in the US as sometimes date challenged, that’s sometime during Dec 14, 2010 using GMT time.
2. Your blog post has to link back to the hosting blog, and the link must be anchored from the logo (found above) which must also appear at the top of the post.
3. If trackbacks won’t work properly then please leave a comment below so that your post is accounted for in the roundup.

Nice Things To Do

1. Include a reference to T-SQL Tuesday in the title of your post. (The more we bloggers advertise T-SQL Tuesday, the more we bloggers get T-SQL Tuesday readers)
2. Tweet using the hash tag #TSQL2sDay to follow links and other relevant conversations.
3. consider hosting T-SQL Tuesday yourself. If you’re interested let Adam Machanic Know. If you’ve participated in two T-SQL Tuesdays previously and you don’t let your blog go stale (blog once a month for the last six months) then he’ll put you in the rotation.

The Topic

I was giving a presentation recently and someone in the audience started to ask about why I recommended against a certain technique. Without getting into it, this person kept saying that she had to implement things her way since the “business” said they needed it done that way. However a little digging showed that the business didn’t really understand the technology. They were asking for a result, and she took them literally in how she implemented a process. A classic impedance mismatch.

I think we’ve all had situations that are similar. The business, the client, the customer, is asking for something, but they don’t know how to ask those of us building the technology. Or they don’t understand the implications of asking for something like “absolutely zero data loss” to be implemented.

The official topic this month is:

What issues have you had in interacting with the business to get your job done.

Post your answer on Dec 14, 2010, based on GMT time, make sure a trackback or link appears in the comments for this blog, and I’ll look forward to reading what issues you have had to work through.

Moving Windows in Windows 7

2010-12-06T11:14:00.000-08:00

I had my laptop connected to a projector recently, and for some reason a few windows got moved off screen, like Twhirl. That was strange, so I did what I have done in the past and right clicked the icon. However that got me this:

I was expecting something more like this:

How did I get that? First I googled and found this link from Ask Leo. He explains the same issue I had and notes that I Windows 7 you have to hold down SHIFT and then right click.

Sure enough, that works and you can select “Move”. From there I use the arrow keys to move things back on screen for me.

Consolidation

2010-12-06T09:35:00.001-08:00

I’m about to go down one laptop, which is good. I have had too many for some time. Right now I’ve got:

Dell 17” Inspiron which is in need of retirement. This is about 8 years old, the wireless radio is whacked, and my son has filled the 30GB HDD.
HP Netbook – Essentially my wife’s now as she uses it to blog. Too slow for me.
Toshiba Qosmio F45 – Been dead for awhile with a CMOS issue. However after 6 months perhaps it’s dead enough I can restart it and give it to a kid
Lenovo W510 – My primary machine, about to lose the DVD drive and get an SSD as a second drive.
Acer 1420P – PDC laptop, which I just sold and need to clean up.
iPad – Testing/demo’ing SQL Monitor from Red Gate. My second travel machine when my little girl doesn’t have ahold of it.

That’s a lot of hardware, in addition to a quad core, 8GB desktop. So I’ll go down a machine, and maybe two if I can get the Toshiba working and send it to my son. Someone else can make do with the Dell.

How Many Have I Read?

2010-12-03T05:09:00.000-08:00

I saw this on Facebook, and while I’m not sure of the list, I reproduced it here. I think that an American list might have a few more books, like The Call of the Wild or White Fang on it. It’s definitely a Western survey as the Koran and Torah aren’t listed. No Heinlein, and a modern list might have Ender’s Game on there as well. Perhaps even The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

Anyway, there are a few on here I think I might tackle, like Of Mice and men.

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

Instructions:

Copy this into your NOTES.
Bold those books you've read in their entirety.
Italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read only an excerpt.
Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses!

I followed a friend's note and used Xs. I've read 38 of these. Or recall having to read them.

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
X Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
x Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
x To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Bible
x Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
x Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (all 3)
x Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
x Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
x Complete Works of Shakespeare - I bought this one year in college. I think I read them all, but hard to be sure.
Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
x The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
x Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
x The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
x War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy - In progress now, part IV
x The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
x Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
x Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeckx
x Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
x Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis
Emma -Jane Austen
Persuasion - Jane Austen
x The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
x Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
x Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
x Animal Farm - George Orwell
x The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
x A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
x Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Atonement - Ian McEwan
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
x Dune - Frank Herbert
Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafonx
A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
x Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
x Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
On The Road - Jack Kerouac
Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
x Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdiex
x Moby Dick - Herman Melville
x Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
x Dracula - Bram Stoker
The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
x Ulysses - James Joyce
x The Inferno - Dante
Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
Germinal - Emile Zola
Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
Possession - AS Byatt
x A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
The Color Purple - Alice Walker
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
x Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
x Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
Watership Down - Richard Adams
A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
x Hamlet - William Shakespeare
x Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

What You Practice

2010-12-03T03:10:00.000-08:00

I saw a very interesting blog at 37 Signals on the quote “the things you do more often are the things you get good at.” It’s aimed more at a business model, talking about the idea of building a service for free without having an idea of how to later convert that to profit.

However I think there is something else here. For most of us, outside of running our own business, the things we do most often are the things that we are interested in, or that speak to us. They are the things we like, and if we are self-aware, we recognize these things and look to build them into our life.

Life is short, and your career is a big part of that. I recommend that you understand what you like to do, and then find a way to do more of it in your career. And enjoy your job more.

Salary Averages

2010-12-02T03:31:00.000-08:00

I saw this posted on Twitter, yet another reason to have a variety of people you follow. Some very interesting links and ideas get shared there.

It’s a set of IT salary charts and values from a recent survey on Datamation. The salaries look about where I expected, though the ones for database administrator managers were higher than I thought. Here’s the chart:

It has a median at $110, which is a nice number. It’s higher than the data warehouse specialist at $92k.

Note these are national averages, but they ought to remind you that IT is a good industry to work in and we are very well paid.

iPad Update

2010-12-01T20:20:00.001-08:00

I updated the iPad tonight to iOS 4.2. I had no particular reason to upgrade, but I saw a few people posting that they had upgraded, and noticed a few apps people had talked about the productivity upgrades of a few apps that required iOS 4.x.

It took a long time. I started at 3:10, but it required iTunes 10.1, and then I had to download the firmware, and it was still updating when I last checked around 6. So I left it and went to karate.

When I got home, it looked the same. The only difference was the addition of “GameCenter” on the main screen. I checked settings, and sure enough it had been updated, but nothing showed multi-tasking, and I couldn’t create a folder.

However a double click on the home button brought up the multi-tasking window, so I could see what was running. Semi-cool, but not sure how useful. We’ll see as I try to use it more. I added DropBox, EasyReader (for PDFs) and a few more items people had mentioned, including a Twitter app.

Now I’ll play with it a bit and see how useful it is.

I also sent a note to a friend to see if they wanted my tablet. If not, I’ll be looking to sell that on eBay and recover some funds. I have the feeling I won’t be traveling with it, and instead I’d like to have the money and look to perhaps upgrade my phone instead.

One thing I noticed last week was in typing on the iPad. I grabbed it to do a bit of blogging and I was surprised at how fast I could type on the virtual keyboard. The spacing is similar to what I like and the audible clicks were very handy. I can see those as being annoying at a conference, so I’d likely need headphones for the feedback for me, set low enough to let me still here what I’m taking notes on.

A cooler, and cooler device, the more I play with it.

Semi-Crippled

2010-12-01T10:23:00.001-08:00

When it rains it pours.

Last week my Nano died. It won’t hold a charge, or at least it won’t play more than about 4 minutes before it reboots. It also can’t get the Nike + sensor to work, and it’s out of warranty. So it’s essentially DoA right now and not worth fixing. My guess is it would be $50 to fix it at a minimum, which seems silly. Not sure what I’ll do for run tracking for now other than manual stuff.

Then two days ago I bent my jawbone headset and snapped off the ear loop. It was already semi-flaky since the case got disconnected, so I ordered a new one.

Yesterday Twhirl stopped working on my desktop. I got an update and all of a sudden it won’t log in. It reports a bad password if I put one in, but the correct password just freezes at the login screen.

Today Livemeeting broke and I couldn’t easily participate in a work meeting. It somewhat sucked since I had things to discuss.

What will go wrong tomorrow? Almost afraid to go skiing.

Real World SQL Azure

2010-12-01T03:44:00.000-08:00

Worthy of an editorial, but this is a pretty good use-case for why SQL Azure might make sense. This is a business where

clients pay by the use of software
there needs to be distributed data center access
there’s a client application that is distributed
usage of versions/databases may scale up or down

Not everyone is in this type of business, but if you are, then SQL Azure might be worth looking at.

No More Drive Extender - Windows Home Server

2010-12-01T03:41:00.000-08:00

I guess I might need to go back to RAID. From the Windows Team Blog, there is a decision to remove Drive Extender from the next version of Windows Home Server. Based on the comments, I’m not alone in thinking this is a stupid move.

The big challenge for me was automatically protecting the data on my various computers. Windows Home Server gave me an easy way to copy the data, and also have it on multiple drives, so it was safe in the event of a drive failure. I have heard that the larger 1TB and 2TB drives are more likely to have corruption as well, so there’s more of an issue here.

Putting RAID together for small systems is a hassle, though perhaps R1 isn’t a big deal if you have 2TB drives. In any case, I’ll be thinking about whether I need to stick with WHS in the future or migrate to some other solution.

Multiple Mirrors

2010-11-30T02:46:00.000-08:00

Up through SQL Server 2008 R2 database mirroring has been limited to a single mirror for each database. While that does work well for many companies, as you become larger and more dependent on your computer systems, there is a need to have multiple mirrors.

Often someone wants to failover to another database on the same network for capacity reasons if there are minor issues. Moving all clients to a secondary data center is not something you always want to do, especially as the secondary data center might not include the same level of bandwidth and may cost more.

HADR

In SQL 11, there is work underway to implement HADR, high availability and disaster recovery, which is an enhanced database mirroring. In this new technology, multiple mirrors are possible, allowing you to have multiple up to date copies of your data in separate locations. These are now called “replicas” and you get up to 4, according to Brent Ozar (HADRON Rocks). I didn’t see that listed, but I’m sure Brent knows more about this stuff than I do.

The other nice things is that you can failover multiple databases together, which you put in an “availability group” and configure together. This is good since many applications might require multiple databases, and it could be important that all databases move to the same server at the same time.

Overall this is cool, and I am looking forward to this technology being deployed. Only one replica works in CTP1, so we can’t really see this working, but it could be an amazing edition to your DR strategy in the future. One note is that this is built on Windows clustering, which no longer requires shared storage, but might require Enterprise Edition, so that will limit how widely this is deployed.

I’ll write more on this later, but the ability to have multiple mirrors, and have multiple databases failover as a group, is something that DBAs should look forward to.

Cleaning Up Blogs

2010-11-29T08:06:00.001-08:00

I highly encourage people to blog. I know that not everyone is a writer, but I think that blogging helps build some extremely valuable skills: communication skills. We all need them, and they help us in our careers, no matter what your job.

At SQLServerCentral, we’ve had a blog section for a number of years. We took the open source Blog.Text project from Microsoft originally, and then migrated to the free Community Server software. At some point we upgraded to a real license, and it’s worked OK. I wouldn’t say I think this is a great use of Community Server, especially as it’s embedded in the rest of the SSC site.

However, our license is limited to 100 blogs. We have debated on an upgrade, but the Community Server people have been reluctant to increase our blog license without increasing the forums, photos, etc. and they want a fairly significant 5 figure price tag. I’m not sure it’s worth it to us, especially as blogs don’t generate a lot of traffic.

I still get requests for blogs, and for the most part we are syndicating blogs from people and just displaying the posts from other sites. I suggest to everyone as I don’t have a good backup/export system and most of the main blog platforms (blogger, wordpress, etc) have this built in.

As I needed to add a new one, I removed a few blogs today. I went through the list and checked a few of the blogs, and found a number that had never had a post. So I removed them to make space and keep us at 100 blogs.

I hate to remove the change for blogging from people, but if someone is not blogging at all, then I need the space for now. I’m hoping that we’ll consider moving to a new platform, but like everything else, it’s a question of resources to integrate something else like Wordpress into our site, or write our own software.

Buried

2010-11-29T04:23:00.000-08:00

Coming back after a week off, even a holiday week when traffic is relatively low, is no fun. I have tons of email, lots of articles, and more than a few meetings to get to as well as a lot of writing to catch up on.

I had hoped to do a little writing over the holiday, but ended up just relaxing with the family and staying fairly unwired. I rarely even tweeted on vacation! A good move for me, and I think it helped refresh me, but it does mean these next few weeks will be very, very busy.

Book Review - The Checklist Manifesto

2010-11-26T08:23:00.001-08:00

Andy Warren recommended The Checklist Manifesto to me and after seeing his review, I decided to grab it. It’s written by a surgeon, and starts with a few stories of how people were saved in the ER by some amazing teamwork.

The book then goes into a discussion on how complex the world is and how we have so much knowledge that we constantly struggle to apply it correctly. Many mistakes in medicine, law, and other fields are often the result of the inability of professionals to apply this knowledge at the right time. We have a data deluge, and he proposes a solution.

A checklist.

Not a step by step process, but more a few simple things that you should be sure to do when an event occurs. Using the complex processes of flying planes, building skyscrapers, and even investing, he shows that this doesn’t just apply to medicine, and really makes you rethink the way complex systems should be implemented.

It’s a great books, and one that I highly recommend you read, especially if you deal with complex systems.

I'm a Midnight DBA

2010-11-24T03:59:00.000-08:00

Well, not really. However when I was recently up in Seattle, Jen and Sean McCown contacted me about being on their show and doing an interview. I agreed, and we met late, as in starting around 9:30pm one night, to do a sit down and interview.

It was totally off the cuff, and I had fun with it. You can check out out here: Steve Jones in the House

A Couple Interesting Talks

2010-11-23T04:13:00.000-08:00

At the PASS Summit a few weeks ago, the keynote talks and the WIT luncheon were streamed live to the world. I watched most of the talks from my house, and some of them were very interesting.

I wouldn’t necessarily recommend the first two days, which were full of too much marketing for me. There are some cool demos, but I’ll let you decide if it’s worth checking out. However the third keynote, from Dr. David Dewitt, was amazing. Just as it was last year, it was mind blowing, and I’m not completely sure I understood it, but it’s worth watching.

David Dewitt Keynote

The Women In Technology luncheon that I thought was interesting as well. I know that not everyone wants to take this on as a cause, but if you think that we should help promote technology to women, check it out.

WIT Luncheon

Quite Time

2010-11-22T04:19:00.000-08:00

It’s vacation week for me. Everything’s scheduled for SQLServerCentral, and my family is taking our annual ski break for Thanksgiving. We left on Sunday, after I returned from SQL Saturday #59 and are not due back in town until Fri or Sat. I’m not even sure how “wired” we’ll be, though I will be tweeting/FB’ing a bit from the slopes.

We typically have gone skiing on Thursday to Sunday, but this year we managed to book a whole week in Winter Park, CO. So we took advantage of it, and I’m leaving work behind.

It’s a good break, and while I’m worried about coming back to tons of articles to edit, I need to break. The last few months have been slightly crazy, and we have lots of stuff in the pipeline for next year, so I need to step back, relax, and then spend December looking to find ways to manage the work life balance.
Hopefully everyone has a great holiday, and if you don’t get a response from my this week, you’ll know why.

Off to the Big Apple

2010-11-19T05:31:00.000-08:00

I’m heading to New York today, off for SQL Saturday #59. Another travel day, but I am looking forward to this trip. First, New York is one of the coolest cities in the world. Second, I get to meet a few people that I’ve wanted to meet: Robert Pearl and the @SQLDiva. I’ve known of them for years, and corresponded with Robert many times, and am looking forward to shaking hands and putting a face with a name. It’s also a good chance to hang with Grant Fritchey, Karen Lopez, and Michael Coles, all of whom I always enjoy seeing.

I’m also looking forward to finding some time to run in Central Park. I’m not sure if I’ll get up early Sat morning or go right after the event, but I have wanted to get a mile or two in that famous place for a long time.

No sports this time, and it’s a busy trip. As soon as I get back I’m also off for a week’s vacation, so this is the culmination of a very busy week for me. Looking forward to time in the mountains next week and a fairly unwired time.

Scheduled Out

2010-11-18T16:24:00.001-08:00

I’m all scheduled out for the next week with newsletters and content ready to go through Nov 29. I’m not sure I’ve ever been this far ahead, often counting on someone else to do a few things for me.

Hopefully this all works out with no phone calls from work next week.

The 2010 SQLServerCentral Party

2010-11-17T08:51:00.001-08:00

A quick look at the SQLServerCentral party at the 2010 PASS Summit, thanks to SQLChicken. It’s on UStream

Not great quality, but some fun commentary from Scott Gleason and Jorge.

My favorite part? A plug from Jorge: “SQL Compare saves booty.”

Cleaner Code Demos – Speaker Hints

2010-11-17T04:20:00.000-08:00

Recently I had the privilege of watching Paul Randal and Kimberly Tripp present (separately) at SQL Server Connections. If you have never seen them talk I would highly recommend you make time if you are ever at an event with them. They do a fantastic job.

In any case, they used SSMS quite regularly to show how various things worked in SQL Server. The thing that struck my quite quickly was the easy in which I could see what they were doing, and they could also track where they were in a large complex script.

Typically when I see someone using Management Studio to present it looks like this:

Granted, this is small, but when it’s projected on a screen, it’s not likely to be much better. The important stuff, the query, and the results, are actually a little hard to see.

When I watched Kimberly do this, I saw this for the query:

With this appearing after execution

A couple things to notice here. First, under the main tab, in this case for SQLQuery1.sql, there are two sub tabs. One is the editor, so you can see lots of code (at font size 12). The other is the results, and when I execute a query, SSMS automatically switches to the results tab.

However not only do I have results, but I also have the query at the top. That easily lets me determine what I’ve just run. When you’re doing a few things, either on stage or at work, having the query shown is very, very handy.

How To Set This Up

First, auto hide the Object Explorer and save yourself some space. You can get the menu below by clicking the little triangle in the Object Explorer header bar.

First let’s set up results. I would change the results to text by right clicking in the query window:

Next, you want to go to the Query menu, and select the Query Options item. In this dialog, there are a few things to configure. First is the results item. Choose text and check the these three items:

Include the query in the result set
Display Results in a Separate Tab
Switch to results tab after the query executes

Then you want to up the font so things are easier to read. I do this first in the Text Editor (see the drop down at the top)

Then do this for the text results, changing the drop down again.

Now when you run a query, you’ll automatically switch over to a screen that is easier to read on a projector. And you’ll see the query you just ran, so it’s easier to keep track of where you are in your presentation.

I actually like these settings so much, I use them for any work I do in SSMS.

My Weekend Just Got Busy

2010-11-16T11:41:00.001-08:00

I’m traveling to New York City on Friday for SQL Saturday #59 and returning Sunday morning. As soon as I get home, I’m heading to Winter Park for a week’s vacation for the Thanksgiving holiday. We were actually supposed to leave Sat, and my wife still might. So I’m planning on getting home from the airport, having things packed, and be ready to head to the mountains.

I was expecting to give my Modern Resume presentation and a short lunchtime SQL Source Control demo. As if that weren’t busy enough, I heard from SQL Saturday #59 yesterday that they were going to take me up on a previous offer to do an early morning “SQL Wake Up” at 8, while people are registering and eating breakfast. I also was asked to do a few SQL Saturday remarks during the opening session, so I have a little prep to do.

With me being gone next week, this already is a busy week, but adding in a SQL Saturday trip means I am going to be really busy this week.

Another Plagiarizer

2010-11-16T11:30:00.001-08:00

I received a note today about someone else that is plagiarizing content from SQLServerCentral. It’s a blog on Windows Live Spaces by 岩松 in Peking. I won’t link it here, since it’s not important.

There are any number of articles copied, with no attribution listed whatsoever. This person is from Peking, and lists their occupation as SE, which I am guessing is software engineer.

I did try to contact them, as I usually do, but their privacy settings prevented me. So I sent a copyright violation to MSN.

I read Brent Ozar’s post yesterday on plagiarism, and I somewhat agree, somewhat not. On one hand I get that cultures view this stuff differently, and laws are viewed/enforced differently. However leaving aside all the legal stuff, what about this:

Do you ever feel that it’s moral for you to take credit for someone else’s work?

I can’t imagine any culture supporting this. Does anyone want to tell their kids they can copy someone else’s work so they don’t have to learn in school? If your neighbor’s kid cut someone’s grass or performed a chore, would you send your kid out to the person’s house to get paid and take credit for the work?

I don’t think most people would. But that’s what they’re doing when there’s no attribution or credit. I get that you might want to “share” information, but why not link back to the first site? At the very least it would raise both your search engine ratings and spread the information further.

Why else would you blog? To get a job? That’s immoral. You’re implying you know how to a) do the task and b) communicate well. At least one of which you haven’t done, and you’re deceiving the person reading it.

Make money from Google ads? Again, you’re implying you deserve the results from work you didn’t create.

There’s no good excuse for re-posting someone else’s work and saying that you deserve credit for it. At least Cook’s Source gave people credit, and just violated copyright law.

Career Advice – Play Your Own Game

2010-11-15T08:29:00.001-08:00

I get asked this question fairly often. How do I find time to write so much, work on SQL Server, have a family, a ranch, etc. It seems that people often want to blog as much as me, or speak, or something else.

It’s natural, I often look at others and think, why can’t I do what he does, or think that I should do what someone does.

I don’t really want to be like someone, however. I don’t want to live another person’s life. I like my life. What I really would like to do is improve my life in some way.

It’s easy to get caught up in trying to emulate someone that’s successful, but that’s the wrong thing. Really you want to take a piece of what someone else does and incorporate it into your life. We all look at the world differently and what might seem to work for someone else, or make them successful isn’t what wil work for you.

Or work in your life.

I try to stress with the Modern Resume that you want to find what works in your life, what you can handle, and what won’t become another stressor. Learn to do what works for you, in your life, and incorporate that.

Don’t try to blog like me, or speak as often as I do, or write a book because someone you admire in this business has done it. Do it because it’s something that will work for you, and work at the appropriate time in your life.

Play your own game.

How I like to work

2010-11-12T03:07:00.000-08:00

This is a great sign. I see if every time I go to Brother’s BBQ in Denver and it never fails to make me smile.

I snapped a quick picture last week, and in case you can’t see it because of the sun, the sign says:

OPEN EVERYDAY

FROM AROUND 10AM

TO AT LEAST 10PM

Those are great hours, especially for restaurant. A little flexibility is good, especially if business is good. Why knock off if things are going well, but why commit to longer hours if there’s no business.

It’s also fun, and fun should be a little more part of our lives.

SQL Rally Pre-Cons

2010-11-11T11:31:00.000-08:00

The SQL Rally pre-conference sessions were announced today, and congratulations to the winners. They are:

Business Intelligence Workshop - Patrick LeBlanc, Devin Knight, Mike Davis, & Adam Jorgensen
Query Performance Tuning, Start to Finish - Grant Fritchey
Maximize Your SQL Server 2008 Coding Skills - Plamen Ratchev
Leadership and Team Management Skills for the Database Professional - Kevin Kline

You can read more about each session here.

These are all great sessions, and no matter who was selected, there wasn't a chance you'd see a bad session. Of these, I'd be likely to attend Grant's session or the BI ones since I think those have the best chance for me to learn something that I could start to use quickly.

The voting was sent to all applicants and I was a little surprised by the results. I don't know if I can disclose anything, so I won't, but there was quite a disparity from first to second place in each category. I'm not sure if that's due to much better marketing from the winners or if it reflects interest. I'd love to know more.

I'm slightly disappointed that I wasn't selected, but I wasn't sure how many people would really want to invest in a half day seminar for about $100 that would help them find a new job. I'm sure their bosses wouldn't. However the PD session from Kevin Kline is a good one, and I think it's a better topic for many companies, who desperately need some leadership in the IT space.

Check the .NET Framework Version Installed

2010-11-10T00:24:00.000-08:00

I haven’t ever worried about this, but I had the need recently to check. I was looking a SQL Sentry’s Plan Explorer and the instructions mentioned that you need the .NET Framework v4.0 installed.

So I decided to check my machine. First I hit Control Panel

However that doesn’t say .NET 4.0 install. Instead it has a “client profile” listed. What does that mean?

I wasn’t confident of this, so I Google’d for the question. I found this blog on How to Check. It lists a Javascript call that you can paste into IE or Firefox.

javascript:alert(navigator.userAgent)

I get this from Firefox:

and this from IE:

Again, .NET4 is listed, but not with a CLR component. So I’m not sure what I have.

Then I went over to Stack Overflow to check. I would this answer, and it lists registry keys. I checked mine and I see this:

So do I have .NET 4.0 or not? At this point I’m still not since it’s hard to determine if I really have the CLR needed. So I decide to just install Plan Explorer and look for error messages.

Pow! Apparently the client profile isn’t enough. So I downloaded the .NET 4 Framework from the link at SQLSentry and then saw this:

.NET Framework extended, which matches the result from IE:

Now I can go play with SQL Sentry’s Plan Explorer. It certainly look cool!

Android Tablet

2010-11-09T20:09:00.000-08:00

I was in Best Buy, actually returning a couple iPads the other day. I had gotten a few for a Red Gate giveaway and left them at home. I purchased two on the road, and when I got back, I took these back to Best Buy.

I'm still debating if an iPad is worth it for me. I like to read electronically, and I think that I could use some of the features on the iPad to better understand how people are publishing content, as well as do presentations. However it still feels like an electronic toy more than a tool, and I'm not sure if it's worth the cost.

While I was at Best Buy, I noticed that there was an Android based tablet there, and decided to check it out.

It's the Huawei Ideos 7" tablet and it runs Android v2.1. That's what most Android phones run, though a few have v2.2. I had enjoyed my Android phone in the past, and at $299, this seemed like this might be a good buy.

So I tried to do a few things. It was rather annoying that the Internet wasn't connected. To me that's a major failing on the part of Best Buy. You'd think they'd enable a wi-fi link so that you could test a few things.

However it really didn't matter. I opened the dictionary and tried to look up a few words, and I was amazed by how slow it was to respond, especially with touch on the screen. I don't remember my phone being that slow to catch a touch, but this took a good half second to pick up a touch, so after the iPhone, it felt like I........was.........typing........really.........slowly.......

Just to check, I popped open the calculator and tried two problems. 9*8 and then 96/12. It took me easily 8-9 seconds each to enter those problems. For comparison, I walked over to the iPad and entered the same problems, both of them, in about 3 sec. For comparison, it was about 8 sec on my Win 7 tablet using the stylus.

That was enough for me. I was hoping that an Android tablet might be a nice alternative, and stack up well at a reduced price, but this isn't even close. I wouldn't pay $100 for this one as it's so slow and annoying to use. The iPad is pricey, but it's smooth, refined, and it works well. I was looking forward to seeing the Galaxy from Samsung, but after this review from some Red Gate folks, it doesn't look like it deserves to cost the same as an iPad.

Back Home

2010-11-09T19:53:00.000-08:00

And glad to be there. I was gone almost 7 days, home only for 24:15:00 before back out on another trip. Between SQL Connections, and a little setup for the PASS Summit, I was beat.

And behind. I had scheduled out newsletters and editorials, but I came back to over 20 articles submitted in the last week along with a dearth of editorials and blog posts. I had hoped to write some while I was gone, but the days get so long and busy that I really didn't. An attempt on the planes didn't really work either, and I was actually too burned out from the travel to even get coherent thoughts out.

I'll be back with more tomorrow, talking about my impressions of Connections, and a few notes from the pre-PASS Summit as well.

Do You Need a Mentor?

2010-11-08T03:45:00.000-08:00

When I was young, I never thought I did. I was sure that I knew what was best for my career and that I could figure things out by studying more, reading more, and learning more. Probably I had some trusts “issues” somewhere in my past, but I didn’t want to put my career in anyone else’s hands.

Over the years I’ve doled out advice to a number of people when they’ve asked, and they’ve come back to thank me. I even was in conversation with a few groups this year and two separate people (different people/places) spoke out in the group, crediting me as a mentor to them.

That surprised me, but it made me stop and think about what I’d asked them and how it had influenced them, based on what they told me. Apparently I had been a bit of a mentor. When someone recently asked me if I’d be a mentor to them, listening and offering advice, I agreed.

Mentoring

Those of us with kids try to mentor them. By definition, mentoring is a more senior person (in experience) providing advice or counsel to a more junior person. This has nothing to do with age, and a mentor in one area might be a mentoree in another.

Looking back I think my career would have been more successful if I had had someone to help guide me, bounce ideas off, and get advice about the directions to take. I’ve had a good career, but I felt like I’ve stumbled in many ways. Fortunately my wife has helped, and my business partner has taught my a lot in the last 6-8 years.

If you are looking to grow your career, I would look around and think about someone that you trust and have a good relationship with that is a more senior person. It could be your boss, a colleague, or even a neighbor. Ask them if they would help you, and see what they say.

Quick Elevators

2010-11-07T09:27:00.001-08:00

I’m at the Renaissance in Seattle for a couple days, stuck on the 14th floor. That’s higher than I normally like to stay, preferring low floors. However there is something that makes a huge difference here.

A fast elevator.

Traveling is often an inconvenience for me. It’s a hassle, it disrupts my schedule, and I feel like I waste a lot of time getting places. Last week I had a 10 minute walk from the convention center to my hotel room, and they were in essentially the same building! But they drag you through the casino, and it’s designed to tempt you on the way, so it ended up being around 1/2 mile. And I had a slow elevator.

Today I got up to run, and then fitness center is on the 28th floor, top of the building. My trip on the elevator, nonstop, was about 15 sec. That’s doors closing and all. Last week the doors would stay open for 10 sec or so, perhaps in expectation of people enjoying themselves a bit much in Vegas, but it was annoying. Here the doors open and almost immediately start to close if no one is there.

I noticed it because on the way back up from breakfast we stopped at floors 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 11, and finally 14. I was starting to get annoyed, but it was almost as quick as my 1 to 4 to 5 trip last week because of the delays in the doors and the slower elevator.

Little things make a difference, and surprisingly to me, the fast elevator here makes a difference.

The Tapestry

2010-11-05T03:51:00.000-07:00

When I run on the treadmill, I have a TV and DVD player down there and have been watching Star Trek: The Next Generation over the last few years on and off. I recently saw an episode called Tapestry and it really made me stop and think.

In this episode, Picard is killed, or dying at the beginning, pulled into Sick Bay. As he fades, we cut to a scene with Q where Picard is told he’s dead. The story goes on to give Picard a chance to change his life, taking him back to the time when he’s newly graduated and just before he’s stabbed in the heart. Picard shows some regret that he started a fight then, and had to receive an artificial heart. You can guess that he relives the scene, but doesn’t get stabbed, resulting in a history he doesn’t like.

As I watched this over a few days, I kept thinking about my life, and regrets. Would I want to go back, with different knowledge, and change anything? I know I have some regrets, some actions that I’m not proud of, but I wouldn’t change anything. The place that I am in today is because of all the choices I made in the past. The good ones, the bad ones, they’ve contributed to the person that I am today.

I’m not a fatalist, but I have an acceptance of life as it is. I strive to do good, to be better, but I understand I’ll make mistakes and I’m frail. I do the best I can at each moment, knowing that sometimes that isn’t my best, and that I might change how I view the world as I grow and learn.

The tapestry of my life is somewhat woven, with more being added each day, but I wouldn’t go back and change anything. If I died today, I would accept that I’ve lived a good life, without wishing for the chance to change my past.

Powershell and Performance Monitoring

2010-11-04T10:22:00.001-07:00

When I was doing performance monitoring of servers, I typically struggled with a good way to get the data. In years past it was cumbersome to keep track of server information and rarely was it done well. So often I found that many problems were the result of simple mis-configuration settings, or a lack of patches. Once a DBA or sysadmin can’t remember everything about every instance, it invites chaos.

Allen White is showing how to better track a “server inventory” to learn all about the setup, configuration, and performance of SQL Server using Powershell. It’s easy to find this information in an ad hoc manner, but keeping track of it and catching exceptions requires something more formal. Powershell is a great way to do that in a repeatable way.

Based on an article at Simple Talk, Allen shows how you can put your servers in an XML file and then read that in from Powershell and use it to drive a series of queries against a particular instance and machine.

Most of this session gives you a good look at a script that will gather various information, including performance data, from your instances. One of the more practical sessions that can really help you understand a large Powershell script in detail.

However Powershell takes some practice. It’s a set of fairly concepts that are designed to be put together, but you need to take a little time to understand how the scripts work.

If you get the chance to see Allen speak, it’s worth it. He does a good job of walking through code and helping you understand how it works.

Powershell and Policy Based Management

2010-11-03T15:18:00.001-07:00

If you haven’t looked at Policy Based Management (PBM), and you manage multiple instances, you ought to really look at it. Even if you manage just a few, having your systems automated just saves you a lot of time and effort.

Allen White is the Powershell guy for me, and he’s showing how you can automate the PBM setup with Powershell. Powershell is another tool that every administrator probably should spend some time working with since it just allows you to repeat the work you need to do with minimal effort.

This is a good session that shows the basics of what PBM is and how it is structured. What’s a policy, a facet, a condition. As an example, Allen shows how to make sure that your database (facet) has autoshrink = False (condition) with a policy that checks this. Loading these types of policies into all your instances can prevent any strange issues that might come about from having differing setups.

A smart DBA will probably have whole sets of these policies, perhaps even different groups for development and production, that are applied to ensure that the knobs are tweaked to your particular environment.

Powershell allows you to script actions. For things you do once, there’s no benefit, but I’ve learned in IT that if you do something once, likely you’ll have to do it again. So having the ability to script things that you might repeat is useful.

Allen shows how to load assemblies in Powershell, connect to SQL Server, and then access objects properties and methods. Most of what I see done here is done in many Powershell sessions. It’s basic programming, but so often people don’t understand basic programming if they are sysadmins. Developers ought to pick this stuff up instantly since it’s the kind of thing they do often. It’s just interpreted, not compiled.

One nice tip from Allen, if you use single quotes, then everything is literally. If you use double quotes, you can have variable substitution.

Building policies with Powershell helps you understand the SMO objects, and it you have a fairly repeatable process. These scripts are something you can easily carry to the next environment, which isn’t as easy in the GUI.

All kinds of things Allen shows, reading the registry, deploying to multiple instances consistently, and more, is easier in Powershell. It’s confusing when you see so many variables, but if you play with Powershell a bit, you’ll find that it’s a great way to manage your systems.

VLDB Issues at SQL Server Connections

2010-11-03T12:50:00.001-07:00

Kim Tripp is a great speaker, with a wealth of knowledge. This session was talking about some of the issues with VLDBs.

What’s a VLDB? Definitely the TB range, but Kim talks about the issues that come with 100s of GBs as well. She mentions one client with a 3TB table. Definitely time for VLDB planning.

She also says that in the last couple of years, almost all of her clients use some type of partitioning. Granted, Kim tends to work with larger, more expensive operations, but interesting to see that partitioning is part of many clients.

This is a DR session. When data is damaged, what do you do? The first think is think about recovery as a step by step process. Don’t freak out.

Your first questions should be who, what, and when. Who noticed it, what is wrong, and when did it happen. Key questions to know, not necessarily for blame, but for recovery purposes. Knowing who is important for security or tracing purposes. Kim says no select/insert/update/delete on tables. Always some other mechanism to access data.

If you don’t know who did something, then it becomes more of a detective case to investigate what might be wrong. Definitely more challenging if you don’t know who did something.

What do you do first? It depends. You might not be able to take the database or server offline, so what do you do? It’s an issue. You can’t usually shut down the database services, so you must think carefully about what you will do.

Recovery from a dropped table

Interesting. A nice sales/customer/employee/product table relationship, with “Sales” being dropped. That’s the easiest one to delete with FKs, but it’s the most important table.

A good backup is needed first. As Kim notes, if you don’t have a good backup, you can’t go very far in recovery.

The sales table gets dropped, and one of Kim’s insert scripts starts failing. As expected, if this for real, likely your phone is going to ring.

First thing: note the time that you first hear of something going wrong.

Second thing, Kim looks to set the database access to “restricted access” meaning only dbos are allowed in. I have never used this, but if you really lost something big, you want to do this. If this happens, that means that your application also needs to handle this and show a good message to clients.

Is it better to be back up or have all the data. That’s a good question. It probably will be different for each business, and maybe each database. What is more important? Might be just getting back up in many cases.

MAKE SURE YOU GET THE TAIL of the log if you can. You don’t want to restore without having this.

Use stopat in all restore statements. It doesn’t have an effect in RESTORE DATABASE, but allowing this means that you get in the habit of using it in all RESTORE commands. The same with the NORECOVERY option.

Her final statement has a WITH RECOVERY, RESTRICTED_USER. That’s nice to have, and let the DBA check without users/systems connecting right away.

Right away, Kim creates a snapshot. She can then easily go back to this point. This is also then used to compare to an investigation database that is a copy of what you restored.

She also resets the identity seed to a higher value in this case. She has a gap, but it’s a known gap that might be useful if you recover more data.

One of the key things that I see is Kim keeping notes of times, and what is done, as she goes through the recovery process for this demo. That’s key in disasters. Having a pad/pen or Notepad around is indispensible.

Kim has a cool script that starts running log restores with ever incrementing STOPAT values to find out where there was an issue. In each restore, then uses tablediff to grab the differences between the snapshot and the test restore to get the missing data that might not be in the database that is now live.

Main points:

contain the damage
decide if data loss or downtime is more important
recover the damaged data
bring offline components online
prevent this in the future

A good DR list to keep handy, and think about first.

Containment part 2

One important thing is to contain the issue and perhaps not take the entire db or server offline.

One thing in Enterprise Edition is to take the secondary files offline, can be useful to take an .ndf file offline. You cannot take an .mdf or .ldf offline, but you can with a .ndf, so for large dbs, separating tables into separate filegroups is a good thing.

Kim shows an online index rebuild that moves a table across multiple files and it’s pretty cool. While users are in the system, the table is moved to a new filegroup/files. This partitions the table to get better control of disasters.

Now we lose a file, and the file needs to go offline. This may or may not affect your application. The connections are killed to the db, but a good application will retry and handle this as a transient error. Users that access the partition that is offline will get a trappable, level 16 error.

Restoring a single file with the move command. That’s cool. Never had to do that myself. Not sure you could do this in SQL 2000 when I had a few disasters. Not sure I had Enterprise Edition in most of my jobs.

Very cool session, highly recommended if you have to plan for, or execute, a DR plan.

Service Broker – SQL Server Connections

2010-11-03T11:27:00.001-07:00

These are some notes and thoughts from sessions and my time at SQL Server Connections/DevConnections in Nov 2010.

Denny Cherry gives a nice warning at the beginning of his sessions. His parents were sailors, so beware of the

Service Broker is alien to so many people. I agree with that. The idea of sending a message, or a insert somewhere and having it process “later” in some other transaction is scary. People are worried. They don’t like the idea of asynchronous processing.

However “later” isn’t some long time in the future. You can have queues process immediately and automatically, and “later” is often milliseconds after you’ve sent the message.

There also is a guarantee of delivery in the queue, so you have essentially transactional consistentcy, just not everything on one transaction that must complete at the same time.

People use XML to send the data since it’s a flexible format. I agree. As heavy as XML can be with all the overhead of the tags, it’s as flexible as things come, and it’s much easier for me to understand and work with than some type of delimiter that gets in the way of the data you are processing. Not that XML doesn’t have issues, but I think it works well.

Denny says that you should have queries ready to check your queues when you set up Service Broker since the first time you do it, it probably won’t work. I can attest that I have had issues, which seem to be a combination of a confusing technology and a dearth of documentation that makes it easy.

Mr. Cherry’s former company was sending 2-3mm messages/hour through Service Broker. That’s a good scale of things happening in an instance. Open conversations can cause issues, but if you can process them quick enough, then you will be in good shape.

ssbdiagnose is a good tool (command line app) to help you figure out what is happening.

Denny uses multiple message types to let the receiver know that something is done. He has a second message type that is a “conversation switch” in which he sends an empty message that lets the receiver know that this set of data is done. That’s a good technique and one I hadn’t thought of. I’d send some EOM in a normal message type, but having a second type makes some sense.

Leaving retention on is a bad idea. No easy way to purge. That wasn’t something I was aware of, though I haven’t sent 2mm messages/hour.

Denny also uses two queues, one for messages and one for acknowledgements. This prevents a line of acks from blocking other messages, which you might have with one queue.

Watching Denny send messages in a basic send/receive SSSB queue, I can see why this hasn’t necessarily caught on. There’s no “wow” moment. Seeing a conversation take place and an acknowledgement are just not exciting. But there are huge possibilities here for auditing, distributed processing and more.

Seeing messages moving between instances in SSMS isn’t that impressive. I think there’s a chance here to write something like the Database Mirroring demo app from Kimberly Tripp that shows queries being run in real time. A series of messages shown on different instances, and being processed would be a simple, nice, .NET app.

No errors are thrown if you aren’t processing queues, which isn’t great, but it’s what I expected. So you need to make sure that you are properly watching and managing queues, especially if you have autogrow enabled on your databases.

Messages are delivered in order, only on a single conversation. So if you have multiple conversations, the messages may not be in chronological order. Denny recommends a single queue and then periodically end the conversation with a random value and restart it.

Service Broker is a neat technology and if you haven’t tried using it, you might want to check out its capabilities.

T-SQL Tuesday #12 – Why Do You Need a DBA?

2010-11-02T03:19:00.000-07:00

It’s once again time for T-SQL Tuesday, the brainchild of Adam Machanic (Blog|Twitter). It’s a monthly blog party, designed to get bloggers to all write on a single topic on the same day. This month we have the party hosted by Paul Randal with his topic of why are DBA skills necessary?

I enjoy participating, and if you want to host one of the monthly events, please contact Adam and get on the schedule. It’s not a lot of work, and it will be something that I’m sure you’ll enjoy.

Is a DBA Needed?

I’ve wondered about this at a few jobs. I know when I’ve automated checks and maintenance, gotten a solid DR plan running, and tuned most of the queries that I can, life is pretty easy as a DBA. I’ve often had time to try and learn more about SQL Server, be more pro-active with developers, and even spend a few minutes at the water cooler. After 6-12 months at a few jobs, I’ve often felt like I had things in control, and I could have worked 24 hours a week and had a very stable environment.

In fact, I tried to convince one boss of that, offering to take a pay cut and maintain his environment in 3 days a week. My boss didn’t go for it, mostly because the company didn’t want any part time people, but I think I could have saved them some money and been fine with the occasional consulting job.

Not every environment is like that, but so many consultants walk into jobs where the SQL Server isn’t performing well, and the applications are slow. A crashed server can become a major event, and even cost the company significant revenue from systems not being able to handle the load or being down.

DBAs are Insurance

At the base level, a DBA provides some insurance for one of a company’s most valuable assets: it’s data. Many DBAs, even those that don’t know how to tune queries or design databases can implement the basics of the job in two areas:

backup/restore
security

Without a doubt there are plenty of people that need to improve these skills, but most of them are better than the average system administrator. A DBA that understands these skills can really save money in a company that has any sort of disaster involving a database. I have seen many Windows administrators relying on their tape backup software and an Open file backup driver, or an agent based backup solution, most of which seem to fail when disaster strikes.

In terms of security, so often a Windows administrator will grant all read/write rights to people accessing SQL Server. Developers can be even worse, granting db_owner privileges, or even using “sa” in their applications. A DBA can ensure that more granular rights are set up, which reduces the risk of any security issues.

Even an expensive DBA provides some good insurance for a company that can pay off the first time a database needs a restore.

DBAs are an Investment

However someone that has strong skills working with SQL Server can be so much more than insurance. They can be an investment that vastly improves the amount of work that your databases systems can do.

DBAs can tune your systems. They can ensure that SQL Server is set up properly, and that proper indexing is set up. The time savings can be a huge factor in allowing employees to be more productive and produce more revenue. If you develop pieces of your own software, a DBA is a must to ensure that you have well-written code.

DBAs can find patterns in your data. I think the DBA is critical to ensuring the intelligence aspect of a BI system. The value of that should not be understated. As we capture more and more information about our businesses, it can be easy to start mis-interpreting or mis-understanding the meaning of that data. A good DBA will understand the business and the data, and help the company to understand what information is contained in the data.

Not always, but often

Not every company needs a full time DBA. I wouldn’t expect a small business that runs COTS systems with a system administrator to have one. But many companies, and likely every company that develops software based on a database (either in-house or shrinkwrap), should have DBA skills. Having someone that understands the database, and can guide its use just prevents so many problems in the future.

You might not need a full-time DBA, but you most likely do need those DBA skills if you have a SQL Server running in your data center.

Finding Your Dream Job

2010-11-01T11:14:00.001-07:00

My pre-conference session for the SQL Rally conference in the spring is called “Finding Your Dream Job”. Chris Shaw ( LinkedIn | blog | @sqlshaw) and I put this together based on a few other presentations that we’ve both given before.

Whether you vote for us, Kevin Kline, or Joe Webb, go vote. All of the sessions are good, and depending on what’s interesting to you, pick the one you’d like to attend.

Vote Now

Why Us?

It’s a good question. After all, is it worth $59 or $99 for a day to get some ideas on how to work on your career? Chris talked a little about why this might help you in his blog. To add to his points with a few of my own.

Promoting one’s self is hard: I find so many people that struggle with promoting themselves. I think we’re all fairly humble at heart, and that’s great.

Except when you’re looking for a better job. Then you need to stand out and we’ll give you ways to do that.

Learn the tools: So many people don’t know how to use the tools available to them. Or they might not even know of tools. We’ll talk about, and give you some good cheat sheets, the tools that you can use and how to use them.

Tips and Tricks: How do you network with people? What’s a good way to blog to show off your knowledge? How do you handle the interview when you’re stumped? We’ll give you these answers and more. Ultimately it’s up to you to close the deal, but we’ll help you be prepared so that you look your best when you’re in front of people.

It’s a competitive world. Stand out in it and we’ll help you learn how to do this.

Leaving (for) Las Vegas

2010-11-01T04:55:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow I’m off to Las Vegas for SQL Connections. Since tomorrow is also T-SQL Tuesday #012, I’m writing a pre-trip blog a day early.

I’ve never been enthralled with the image of Las Vegas, but I went there earlier this year with my wife for a vacation and had a great time. I did finally gamble at a card table, and actually won money, but it’s not something that I’m overly excited to do again.

This is my first trip ever to SQL Server Connections and DevConnections. I had hoped to go last year, but my wife broke her arm and I ended up cancelling my trip. This year SQLServerCentral is sponsoring a track again with some great speakers to teach you about SQL Server. We have:

Brad McGehee
Allen White
Buck Woody
Glenn Berry

I elected not to speak so that I could see more of the show and report on what it’s like. With more and more people becoming hybrid DBAs, I think this is a great format for a show. Many people these days fine themselves needing skills in other technologies, like Windows, Sharepoint, .Net or something else.

I am curious to compare this event with others, and see if it might be a great place for SQL Server professionals to get a wide variety of knowledge that can help them work with the different aspects of IT that they need in their jobs.

I’m also looking forward to sitting down with a few friends I haven’t seen in some time and catching up on what’s happening in their lives.

If you live in the area, but won’t be at the show, I’ll also be speaking at the Las Vegas SQL Server User Group on Thursday night, so come out and say hi.

Shopping

2010-10-29T09:23:00.001-07:00

In about a week and a half, the SQLServerCentral opening night party takes place at the PASS Summit. And while I won’t be there, I’m in charge of the prizes that will be going out to everyone attending.

In the past I’ve usually done a couple big Best Buy trips to load up on prizes, but this year I tried a few new things. Up until about two weeks ago, I was worried about my budget since the registration numbers were down for my referral code. So I went looking for some lower priced prizes since I tend to value some level of quantity and try to get more prizes out to people.

Fortunately, about that time I ended up with an email from ThinkGeek. With my kids by my side, we surfed around the site and ended up with a few things. I won’t list them all, but I did get some of these:

I also did hit Best Buy and grab a bunch of DVDs that were on sale. Among the titles I got were:

Iron Man 2
Hancock
Matrix all 3 in one
Batman - all 4 in one
more!

As I wandered around, however I saw some other interesting things and grabbed a few:

and

And since my budget was a little higher than expected, I grabbed nice prizes. I wasn’t sure that I’d get one of these, but I did (these are going to Connections, but I have another).

In the past we’ve saved three big prizes for the most profitable gambling winners, though I’m not sure I’ll do that for the iPad. Likely I’ll have someone do a drawing from the tickets at the Exceptional DBA presentation and award it then.

Good luck to everyone!

My Bucket List

2010-10-29T04:32:00.000-07:00

I actually built on in 1999 and called it a Life List. Over the years I’ve tried to work on the list each year, knocking off something, but I also learned something. I learned that as I grew, and my life was more enjoyable, some of the things on my list no longer matter. I haven’t removed them because I spent some time on it and maybe they’ll come back later, but right now I’m pretty happy with my life.

However I saw Brent Ozar’s list recently, and a few more (Aaron Bertrand, Jason Brimhall), so I decided to update mine with a short list for my career.

In no particular order:

Write a business book – It could be on business in general, professional development, or something else.

Write a piece of software – I’ve done some development work, and written some utilities, but I’d like to write something that is useful to others, probably something on the web. SQL Saturday is my template, but I’d like to do something similar, but in a different area.

Work for a non-profit – borrowed from my other list. Habitat for Humanity is at the top of my list, but maybe a local food bank will get me for a significant amount of time at some point.

Mentor someone, explicitly – I’ve done some of this without meaning to, and people have recognized it. I’d like to ask someone if I can, or have them ask me and have it reach some type of completion status.

Drive a Race Car – I’m fairly conservative and careful, and actually am tempted to pull my “skydiving” off my other list. But reading Brent’s list made me think about getting on a racetrack for a day or two. I actually investigated this a few years ago.

Drive around the country and see all 50 states – I’ve driven across the US, multiple times in fact. However I’d like to get an RV and just cruise at some point. Likely it would be a 5th wheel living quarters trailer so my wife can bring her horses, but that would be great.

There’s likely more, and I know that my old list could use a re-vamping, but this will do for now.

Overwhelmed, Stress, and Planning

2010-10-28T04:59:00.000-07:00

It’s been a bit hectic this year. In fact, it feels crazy most weeks as I try to manage work, home life, and free time. More and more I have been having a night or two a week where I just want to lay in bed and watch some TV to unwind. I even find myself ignoring email on the weekends, which is something I never used to do. If I could process something in a minute, I’d rather just handle it.

However when stress hits, and you feel like there’s too much to do, it’s good to be able to let things go, or at least delay them for a bit. And that’s what I’ve trying. I’m slightly behind on articles, and likely need to send a few apology letters to authors.

I started to free up time for next year, anticipating that I might be doing more volunteer work. When that fell through, I started to direct that energy elsewhere, looking for other community engagements. However that started to grow like crazy, and I once again find myself slightly overwhelmed.

My son has karate 3 nights a week (as do I), my daughter had 2 days of volleyball a week, and my wife has had a few trips, which mean I have horse chores. I’ve been to a few SQL Saturdays lately, and have one more in addition to the SQL Connections and PASS Summit coming up next month. Then there’s ski season. It’s one of the ways I try to get away from work and manage stress, and I look forward to it. But it means that I have to prep for the time off.

I would like to get to more community events in 2011, but I am starting to wonder if I will. The SQL Saturdays are short trips, but the time away adds up and I’d like to actually slow down a bit next year and take on less project stuff.

There’s more to life than work, and I’m trying to remember that. Hopefully more of you remember that as well and ensure you have a good balance in life. It's good to recognize when you're out of balance and look to correct the situation. I'm not sure what I will do, but I am aware that I need to plan on doing something different next year.

The SQL Rally - Who Would I Vote For?

2010-10-27T08:55:00.001-07:00

I was looking over the pre-conference sessions submitted for the SQL Rally event taking place next May in Orlando. I think it’s great that the community gets the chance to vote on the submissions and help decide what will be offered.

Note that you don’t have to attend the event to vote, so go vote now. Vote honestly, and think about what you’d be interested in seeing, and paying for.

But go vote!

I’ve seen some posts from Joe Webb, Andy Leonard, Grant Fritchey and Brian Kelley as well as others on their submissions. I went to vote, and thought there were some great sessions. So who would I vote for? Let’s break them down:

BI Track

A Day of SSIS with Andy Leonard: Andy is a friend and I’ve seen him speak. He’s got that down home, Southern style and he’s easy to listen to. Andy is one of my go-to people for SSIS questions and this session likely will give you the framework for building great SSIS packages along with tools to help to ensure you know what will be happening in your ETL process. I think this would give me the outline of how to better design SSIS packages.

Business Intelligence Workshop with Patrick LeBlanc, Devin Knight, Mike Davis and Adam Jorgensen. Patrick is a good friend as well and the rest of the Pragmatic Works crew are talented consultants that I’ve recommended work to. Learn to build a data warehouse from start to finish. Ambitious, but I can certainly see this happening. After all, founder Brian Knight used to build a SQL Server cluster in an hour, something that was equally impressive.

Advanced Reporting Services – How to achieve almost anything by Simon Sabin. I think Simon is one of the people that I would highly recommend for almost any SQL Server work in the UK. He’s a great speaker, and easy to understand. This session looks like a great outline for how to design your reporting infrastructure so that it is flexible and you can build those reports quicker than ever.

The winner?

You can’t go wrong with any of these sessions. They all cover slightly different topics, but you have great topics and they’ll all be great. I expect that the community’s majority on the topic (SSIS, SSRS, DW) is what will get picked. I’d choose SSIS, but only because I think Andy would teach me a ton in one day that would help me get an SSIS job if I needed one.

DBA Track

Multi-SQL Server Management with PowerShell with Aaron Nelson. Aaron is one of the people that I think has done wonders with Powershell. Allen White, Sean McCown, and Aaron are the people I’d go to with Powershell questions. If I were managing servers, I’d do to this session. Powershell is built for scripting, and multiple servers require scripting to manage effectively and efficently. Aaron tells you to bring a laptop and I expect tons of code to be shown and examined.

SQL PowerShell for the DBA with Maximo R. Trinidad. I don’t know Maximo, but this looks like a nice intro to Powershell. If you’ve never touched the product, this is likely the session you’ll want to spend some time in to get up to speed quickly.

Top-to-Bottom SQL Server Security with Brian Kelley. Brian has been someone I’ve known for a decade and he’s a top notch, SQL Server expert. Much of his work has been with security, and he is definitely the person I’d call about any security issues. This looks like a great session, one that will teach you about many of the security things that most of us never think of. I’ve seen some sessions from the SANS Institute and the security people just look at the world differently. This should be a valuable session for anyone that has a high security or highly regulated environment.

Query Performance Tuning, Start to Finish with Grant Fritchey. I’ve known Grant for many years, and we talked about his session before it was submitted. Grant’s a great speaker, and you’ll enjoy listening. However Grant’s also written two great books on performance tuning and execution plans. He’s bringing that experience here and packing a ton into a day of learning.

The winner? I think these are all worthy sessions, but I’d have to say that if I were voting with my wallet, I’d pick Grant’s session. I’d learn something in any of them, but gaining more knowledge on query tuning would be of more interest to me. Brian’s security one would be a close second, and if I actually had to manage multiple servers, I’d probably think about Aaron’s Powershell one.

Developer Track

What every .NET developer MUST know about SQL Server

with Klaus Aschenbrenner. I haven’t seen Klaus speak, but this title caught my eye immediately. I think this is exactly the type of session that every developer that isn’t highly experienced with SQL Server should attend. I don’t know how it will go across since I haven’t seen it, but I love the topic.

Database Design Workshop by Louis Davidson. I’ve seen Louis speak quite a few times and I think he’s one of the people that really understands and cares about good database design. He has done this session, or a similar one a few times, including at the PASS Summit. You can’t go wrong with this one.

Maximize Your SQL Server 2008 Coding Skills with Plamen Ratchev. I met Plamen a few years ago and was impressed with him. I even borrowed part of one of his presentations (with permission) to incorporate into one I was doing. Plamen knows a lot about T-SQL and if you write T-SQL code, then this is likely the one to vote for. It doesn’t take any more time to do it right, IF you know how to do it right. Learn how to do it right.

The Winner? I’d have to say that Plamen’s session on T-SQL, including the new enhancements would be the one I pick.

Misc

I submitted one here, so keep that in mind.

Finding Your Dream Job with Steve Jones and Chris Shaw. Yep, this is mine. It’s based on the Modern Resume presentation I’ve done many times and Chris’ work with interviewing and finding a good job. I listened to Chris’ 24 Hours of PASS presentation and was impressed. And we decided to do one together. We’re looking to teach you how to find the job that fits you, and then get it by improving your skills and making yourself more attractive to employers.

So I Got Promoted, Now What? with Joe Webb. Joe is a great speaker and this session will help you figure out how to move out of being just a technical guy to being a manager or lead. Make no mistake, managing people is not easy and it requires new skills. This is a great place to learn how to adapt.

Leadership and Team Management Skills for the Database Professional with Kevin Kline. Kevin has been a leader for years. He is one of the people that stands out in the SQL Server field. We need more leadership and managerial skills and if you are looking for the SQL equivalent of “Win Friends and Influence People,” this is it.

The winner? I can’t pick one here. If you want to find a better job, then my session will help, although the leadership skills from Joe and Kevin can help with that as well. If you are interested in being a team lead, manager, or some other supervisory role, pick Joe or Kevin.

They’re All Good

Rarely have I found any bad pre-conference sessions offered, and in this case I think you have some tough decisions to make. But Vote for something, and pick those sessions that you think will help you most with your career.

Common SQL Server Mistakes – Functions in the WHERE Clause

2010-10-27T04:23:00.000-07:00

This continues my series on Common SQL Server mistakes, looking at more T-SQL mistakes.

What’s Wrong?

If you saw a query like this, would you see a problem?

select 
   o.OrderID
   , o.CustomerID
   , o.Qty
  from Orders o
  where datepart( yyyy, o.OrderDate) = '2010'

If there are 1,000 orders in this table, there probably isn’t an issue. But if there are 1,000,000, then this is an issue.

Why? Let’s examine the execution plan:

This table has 1000 rows in it, but it doesn’t use indexing to find those orders that were placed in 2010. Instead it scans all rows. The reason is that the function being used in the WHERE clause means that the index cannot be used.

Instead, what you would want to do is write the query like this:

 select 
   o.OrderID
   , o.*
   , o.Qty
  from [OrderItems] o
  where o.OrderDate >= '20100101'

In this way, we eliminate the function from the WHERE clause and allow the query optimizer to take advantage of the indexes on the column OrderDate.

You see similar issues with queries like:

select 
  lastname
  from Person.Contact
  where left(Lastname, 1) = 'S'

This can be fixed as:

select 
  lastname
  from Person.Contact
  where Lastname like 'S%'

Basically you want to move the function away from the column and put it on the other side of the comparison so that indexes can be used.

Too often we have developers writing queries like this, assuming that the functions are efficient. They are, but when they are executed against every row in a table, an index can’t be used for seek operations, which are always quicker than scans for any significant data set.

When you are writing queries, do your best to avoid functions against columns in your tables. Instead try to rework the query to move the function. An alternative that I’ll blog about another time is computed columns.

The SQL Rally Pre Conference Seminars

2010-10-26T07:53:00.001-07:00

There’s a change in how pre-conference seminars are being picked for the SQL Rally event next year in Orlando, FL. You, as the people that may attend, are getting the chance to vote on which sessions you’d like to see.
Vote Here
You get to pick from seminars in various categories, voting once for each session. The descriptions of the sessions are here:
BI Sessions: http://www.sqlpass.org/sqlrally/2011/PreConsforVotingBI.aspx
DBA Sessions: http://www.sqlpass.org/sqlrally/2011/PreConsforVotingDba.aspx
Developer Sessions: http://www.sqlpass.org/sqlrally/2011/PreConsforVotingDev.aspx
Misc Sessions: http://www.sqlpass.org/sqlrally/2011/PreConsforVotingMisc.aspx

I have a session submitted for the Misc area, which is Finding Your Dream Job, a combination of my Modern Resume work and Chris Shaw’s various presentations on getting a new job. We decided that a half day would be a good way for us to give you practical advice on ways to get a better job, or just a job.

Whether you vote for us or not, I think this is a great way to get community feedback. I’ve been suspect that PASS has any idea what people want to see, relying on previous year’s limited data. This at least allows the community to have a say in what gets picked.

I would prefer that voting results were tabulated immediately so we could see what the response is. Based on my experiences, I'm slightly concerned that the community will be over-ridden if PASS thinks something will sell better.

Also, consider attending the SQL Rally in Orlando next May, especially if you find that the price of the Summit is too high. At an estimated $300 to attend, even with a hotel and some travel, you could get a tremendous amount of SQL training and networking for around $1000. And to me, this is way more valuable than sitting in a classroom for 5 days. Think about it, this could be a great investment in your career.

SQL Server 2008 - CDC Retention

2010-10-26T03:13:00.000-07:00

I had done a little work with CDC last year, experimenting with the way that it handles changes in your database. Someone had asked me the question about the retention period since the default of 3 days was not sufficient for their environment.

BOL lists the default retention period as three days, and this is based on a cleanup job that goes through and removes data from the tables. However you can alter that with a stored procedure: sys.sp_cdc_change_job.

There are a number of parameters for this procedure, most dealing with managing the load of the cdc jobs. You can alter the cleanup or capture jobs with this, but for the retention period, you want to change the cleanup job.

@retention is the parameter that indicates the number of minutes that change rows are going to be retained in the CDC tables. If you pass in a NULL, the old retention period is retained. You can include the number of minutes you’d like, up to 52494800 (100 years). I would recommend you choose something less.

The other thing to be aware of is that you have various intervals that are set, and also a @threshold, which determines how many rows are deleted on each scan. If you limit the cleanup to something less than continuously operating, then be aware that if @threshold is too low, it might not delete all the rows. If you are changing these values to manage the load of deletions, be sure that you are monitoring how many rows are changing as it might grow over time.

T-SQL Tuesday Topics

2010-10-25T08:47:00.001-07:00

I was asked to host a T-SQL Tuesday, and I accepted.

Once again, my fingers move a bit faster than my brain. “Sure, be happy to host one. Send me a date” flew out of my fingers before I thought through the implications. I’m happy to help the community, and I think Adam Machanic (Blog|Twitter) had a fantastic idea with the T-SQL Tuesday blog party, and I look forward to them every month.

But I’m busy, and this is a very busy time of year for the next month, with the hope that most of December will be quiet for me. It’s been a crazy year for me and I’m looking to try and better manage life next year.
Adam immediately responded to my email with a date, and I have December. I was thinking he’s a busy guy, and my mail might get lost in the shuffle. However it didn’t and I ended up with not only an acceptance, but a date that’s not too far in the future.

So I need a topic.

There are any number of topics out there, and after all, T-SQL Tuesday has only been around for a year. However I was somewhat stumped as to what a “good topic” will be. After all, I want this to be a good one.
The ones I’ve seen so far are:

I’ve got a few ideas, and some work ahead of me to develop something in the next month around SQL Connections, SQL Saturday #59 and a week of family vacation. If you have any ideas of your own, don’t post them. Save them for your own T-SQL Tuesday and contact Adam to host one.

I’m not sure what will happen in November, and I’ll be jammed up with a post since I’ll be at Connections next week, so whether it’s the first Tuesday or second, I’ll be hustling a bit to participate.

New Looks

2010-10-22T03:49:00.000-07:00

It’s been quite a few years since I updated the Hawaiian shirt wardrobe. I bought a series of 5 shirts for TechEd years ago, having “SQLServerCentral.com” embroidered on each of them. I had 3 copies of each shirt, with Andy, Brian, and myself having a selection of shirts to wear.

In the in between years I’ve purchased a couple more, but no customization. However this year I needed to outfit my “Scary DBA bouncer” for the SQLServerCentral party. He made a joke about getting a shirt like the one I wore for the Baton Rouge SQL Saturday keynote, and I decided it was time to get a few more for myself, so I started searching around.

The last time I was looking for someone that would customize the shirts. I didn’t find a lot of places in 2004, but there are more now. However I was a little worried about turnaround. So I looked locally. After pinging 3 or 4 places in the Denver area, Burbank Embroidery said they’d be able to handle a few pieces (I was thinking 6 or 7 shirts) at a reasonable rate and have them done by Oct 29th.

So then I was searching for shirts. For some reason I wandered onto Beanteacher Hawaiian Wear and found some great shirts. They had a nice online store, and when one of my shirts was out of stock, they promptly emailed me with a few choices and I picked one. My order arrived within a week, and I was happy with the qualify and service from them.

The shirts are at the shop, and I should pick them up next week sometime, just in time for them to accompany me to SQL Connections in November. And in time to get the Scary DBA properly dressed.

SQL Saturday Advice - Extra Food

2010-10-21T04:58:00.000-07:00

No matter whether you provide the food or have people pay for it, it seems that at every SQL Saturday I’ve attended, there is extra food left over. Sometimes it’s a very significant quantity. At one of the events I think there were over 50 boxes lunches left over.

You need a disposal plan.

Now it’s easy to toss the food, or give some to volunteers if they want it, however I’d encourage you to think a little wider, or maybe even more socially. Think about how you put that food to good use.

At the Rocky Mountain Tech Trifecta that we’ve run for a few years we typically have no issues with leftover pizza. Plenty of students are wandering the halls on a Saturday and are more than happy to help us dispose of a few slices. I like to think we’re doing a good thing by allowing students a free meal after the attendees have eaten.

In many events, however, there isn’t a large group of people walking around the area that would appreciate the food. After both the Denver and Kansas City SQL Saturdays, the leftover food was donated to local missions that used it to feed those people who are down on their luck. I know a few other events have done this as well, and I’d encourage everyone to consider a local mission in your area. If you are having trouble finding one, contact a few churches nearby your event and I’m sure they can help.

I’d like to think that those of us in IT are fairly well off compared to many people in the world. And I think that we can do a bit more to give back to others that might not be as fortunate. Have a disposal plan for extra food and don’t let it go to waste.

Boulder SQL Server User’s Group - Common SQL Server Mistakes

2010-10-20T10:12:00.001-07:00

The first iteration of my presentation on Common SQL Server Mistakes, based on the various things I’ve seen in the forums over the years as well as written about on this blog, was last night.

It went fairly well, though not a lot of questions from the group and I ended up running ahead of schedule. Afterwards we had a nice debate on triggers, which I need to blog about as well.

Good getting up to Boulder, or Broomfield in this case, for the meeting. It’s at Level 3, which is a great facility, and I’m hoping that we can hold another event there at some point.

I’ve uploaded the presentation to SQLServerCentral if you are interested in seeing the deck.

Common SQL Server – Not Indexing FKs

2010-10-20T04:20:00.000-07:00

This series looks at Common SQL Server mistakes that I see many people making in SQL Server.

Foreign Keys

It’s way too often that I see people building databases without including declared referential integrity (DRI) in their databases. Even when I see people setting a primary key on tables, it seems that often they ignore foreign keys and creating linkages between tables that link them together.

However, even when people have declared a FK, they often don’t create an index on that column. Perhaps they assume that SQL Server will create the index like it does for PKs, but it does not.

If I create these two tables and join them with a FK:

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[Products](
     [ProductID] [int] NOT NULL,
     [ProductName] [varchar](50) NULL,
  CONSTRAINT [PK_Products] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED 
 (
     [ProductID] ASC
 )
 ) ON [PRIMARY]
 
 GO
 CREATE TABLE [dbo].[ProductDetails](
     [ProductDetailID] [int] NOT NULL,
     [ProductID] [int] NULL,
     [SKU] [varchar](50) NULL,
     [Price] [numeric](18, 2) NULL,
  CONSTRAINT [PK_ProductDetails] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED 
 (
     [ProductDetailID] ASC
 )
 ) ON [PRIMARY]
 GO
 ALTER TABLE [dbo].[ProductDetails]  WITH CHECK ADD  CONSTRAINT [FK_ProductDetails_Products] FOREIGN KEY([ProductID])
 REFERENCES [dbo].[Products] ([ProductID])
 GO
 
 ALTER TABLE [dbo].[ProductDetails] CHECK CONSTRAINT [FK_ProductDetails_Products]
 GO

If I go and check indexes on ProductDetails, I find that there is only one index, the index for the PK.

Why is this a problem? It’s because of performance. We should realize that indexes speed up performance by reducing the amount of work that SQL Server has to do.

With FK columns, what I’ve often found with child tables is that I know the value of the FK column I am searching for and don’t need to join with the parent table. However without an index on the FK column, this query requires a table scan.

select
  sku
  , price
  from ProductDetails pd
  where pd.ProductID = 3

If you are creating FKs in your database, don’t forget to index them where appropriate.

Auto Creation

I’ve seen some people ask why SQL Server doesn’t automatically create indexes on those FK columns. I am torn on this, but I like the 80/20 rle. If 80% of the tables would benefit from it, I think it should be done. I am leaning towards some intelligent mechanism to do this.

The main issue is that you might not want just an index on the FK column. You might want some sort of covering index that includes columns in addition to the FK column to prevent key/bookmark lookups to the clustered index. If you can avoid those, you can drastically increase performance.

There is also the chance that with your query load, you never use these indexes. That can be horrible for performance as well since there is overhead to maintain these indexes on all insert/update/delete operations.

The Advice

Look at the queries that are coming into your database. Check the missing index DMVs and if you find that the FK columns are being used, index them.

If you’re not sure, or don’t know how to look for missing indexes, here’s a reference.

Database Mirroring Connection Strings - Automatic Failover

2010-10-19T03:24:00.000-07:00

I saw a post recently from Hugo Shebbeare that reminded me of something that I’ve seen asked often on the forums. One thing that I preach to people is that they should use their blog to show what they know, and in this case I want to do that. Also, I remind people to give credit to the inspiration, as I’ve done with the link to Hugo above.

Database mirroring has automatic failover if you have newer SQL Server clients. Those of you with Vista or Windows 7 should be fine, though XP might need an update. SQL Server 2005 started distributing a client that would handle automatic failover, and it does this through the connection string. Here’s a typical one:

Server=DBServer01;Database=Sales;Connection Timeout=30;Integrated Security=SSPI;Failover Partner=DBServer02

In this string we have our main database instance (DBServer01) and the database (Sales). Our mirror server is called DBServer02, and the database name on this server would be the same. Note that you can use IP or named instances as in DBServer01\Sales as well for the connection strings.

If the client has issues connecting to the primary, when the Connection Timeout passes, it will try to connect to the mirror server and start working there. Note that if you had a transaction in progress when the failure occurred, your application has to reconnect to the other server and resubmit the batch.

Copyright

2010-10-18T03:10:00.000-07:00

This is actually amazing. A talk on what YouTube does with copyright and how they view it, from TED. It’s interesting, and there are two things in there to watch. Note, that I caught this link from Jeff Atwood (@CodingHorror) on his blog.

The first thing is that YouTube scans over 100 years of video every day. 100 years! That’s freaking amazing. That is an incredible amount of video processing that’s taking place, and a low of power being spent to enforce copyright. Forget about the legal issues for a minute and think about the technology. That is just amazing.

The second thing in the talk is that content owners can, and are choosing, to not block this content, but rather use it to generate some benefits from them. They ought to be able to receive some benefits, and I agree, but knocking down some kid’s video because he used a copyrighted song seems silly. Especially as in the case of the wedding video, you never know what will go viral and what benefits you’ll get. Including selling more copies of your stuff.

However the thing that worries me is that we are now not looking out for Fair Use. If a copyright holder wants to block their content, can we still get our 30sec of use of it in a video we make? Or a mashup?

The copyright office doesn’t necessarily define the fair use guidelines, but I think they need to. We ought to have some idea of what portion of audio, video, imagery, and text can be used, with citation. Even with automatic citation, that may benefit the copyright holder.

We publish books here through Simple Talk Publishing. We typically offer books for free as marketing materials here on the site, and also sell them on Amazon and other retailers. Regularly I find these republished, or even for sale, on the Internet on other sites. I understand people wanting to share, but ultimately it’s a problem for us if all our books become too widely distributed for free. I know there are a lot of debates on piracy, and I’m not completely sure where I stand. I don’t actively worry about piracy, but I do act to have things removed when I find it.

We need to do something here to both protect the copyright holders, but also allow people to reuse ideas and build on them. I certainly wouldn’t mind someone republishing portions of my work, or building their own knowledge publications based on it, just don’t wholesale copy what I’ve done without giving me any credit.

I think YouTube has a good balance here, though I’d like to see more efforts from content owners to share and allow others to build on their work.

Kindle v iPad

2010-10-15T02:45:00.000-07:00

I don’t have either, but I ran across this comparison on the devices. It says get both, if you’re a consumer of media and culture. To some extent I do think that it’s got a perspective that makes sense, and if you can afford a $500 iPad (or more), then you can probably add in a $140 Kindle without worrying about it.

I had a Gen 1 Kindle, and I have an iPhone that is my primary way to read. I read on flights, and while I do take breaks and play some games, I think it’s a matter of attention span. Books that are really, really good hold my attention, and I won’t move on to anything else.

Books that I struggle with, or require more thinking, I switch off at times. When I read business books, I sometimes need to think about something, so I’ll close the Kindle app for a minute, maybe play a game, and let my mind wander with what I’ve read.

There definitely is a difference in reading on an LCD and e-ink. It doesn’t bother me, or it doesn’t appear to, but I understand that it might bother some people, and if that’s the case, a Kindle/Nook/eReader makes more sense.

I’m not sure if I’ll get an iPad. It has to function in my life and add something to it, and I’m not sure it’s that much better than an iPhone. Talking with someone recently that carries an iPhone, iPad, and laptop, they tended to use the iPad regularly, but it didn’t remove the need for the other devices. We’ll see if I make a case in my mind to get one.

However you do it, go read. It’s good for you.

SQL Saturday Advice – Speaker Communication

2010-10-14T07:19:00.000-07:00

Recently I was at an event and a speaker wasn’t able to make a session. There was a minor scramble, and the session ended up being cancelled, which is fine, but it got me thinking about what I would do if I had an emergency.

I don’t always have the contact information for organizers, and it’s not easily available. In some cases, I’m not sure how I’d get in touch with someone. I usually have an email, but not always, and I think my emergency solution would be to “tweet” that I wouldn’t be there with the hashtag for the event and hope someone picks it up.

However I think there’s a better solution. In the speaker communication the last week before the event, let all speakers know that they are expected to meet their commitments and give them 2 or 3 phone numbers to call for issues. Make sure those people keep their cell phones handy and can respond.

I’d also be sure you have address, phone, and map links for all the locations for speakers. I know most should be local, but spending a few minutes including links in the emails will help ensure that speakers have a smooth event and are happy to come back again.

Common SQL Server Mistakes – Equals NULL

2010-10-13T03:20:00.000-07:00

One thing that I don’t see a lot, but it still happens with people new to SQL Server is the comparisons they’ll make with NULL values. Often those people new to T-SQL will write this:

select CustomerID, CustomerName
  from Customers
  where SalesRepID = NULL

The thought here is they are looking for those customers that don’t have a salesrep assigned. Or they might enclose the NULL in quotes, but this won’t work.

The correct way to do this is:

select CustomerID, CustomerName
  from Customers
  where SalesRepID Is NULL

Note the “Is NULL” that will correctly return those customers who have a NULL value stored in that column.

Why?

NULL is an unknown value. We just don’t know what value it is, so it’s not a variable in algebra like “x”. In algebra, x=x, but NULL != NULL. Since we don’t know what the value is, and since each row could potentially have a different value (remember every NULL’s value is unknown) we can’t expect any NULL to equal any other NULL.

NULL isn’t a placeholder like a blank or space, or even zero. It’s an unknown value, so equals (and not equals) does not apply. Instead you need to use “Is NULL” or “Is Not NULL” for your comparisons.

Google Wind

2010-10-12T09:12:00.001-07:00

I’m not sure Google is a better company than Microsoft or some of the other extremely large companies that get caught up in dominating a market. However they are engaged in some interesting projects, and I have to think that the founders, or someone high up in management is really looking to solve some problems in the world.

Google is funding a power backbone for offshore wind farms. Essentially an undersea cable to carry electricity from offshore windmills. IT looks like it will go from near my hometown of Norfolk up to the New Jersey/New York area.

I’m not sold this is the best way to get wind power from the coasts, but it’s worth trying. I worry about the issues of the ocean damaging the equipment over time. I’d love to see more installations along the Eastern Shore first, maybe vertical windmills that might not harm birds.

I’m glad that Google is willing to make the $5B investment in it and try to jumpstart some offshore farms. Especially as we use more and more power for these digital devices. I know there are some nice coast guard installations about 7mi offshore that I used to dive near.

T-SQL Tuesday #12 - Misconceptions

2010-10-12T04:34:00.000-07:00

It’s time for T-SQL Tuesday again, and I’m happy to participate again. This is a monthly blog party started by Adam Machanic (Blog|Twitter )that asks people to write on a particular topic all on the same day.

This month’s theme is misconceptions in SQL Server, hosted by Sankar Reddy. You can read the rules for the party and get information from his blog.

The Most Common Misconception

I read a lot of forum posts, literally hundreds a week on all topics in SQL Server. One thing that I consistently see asked is the dreaded:

“My transaction log has grown so large it filled the disk”

That’s a common occurrence, too common in my opinion, and while there are people that forget to setup any backups, I also find in the majority of cases people just don’t understand one thing:

A full backup does not clear the transaction log.

Too many people assume that the log will get managed by a full backup. It doesn’t. While some log record get included in a full backup, they do not get marked as “backed up” and the space re-used.

If there is one thing that I wish everyone managing a SQL Server knew, it would be that they need to make full and log backups to properly manage the disk space usage by their logs.

Return Values from XP_CMDSHELL

2010-10-11T03:32:00.000-07:00

Let’s be clear: I don’t recommend the use of xp_cmdshell as a general tool. It ought to be used when you have no alternatives, and you should carefully control access and what this can do. Opening a shell from SQL Server can be dangerous for your server.

That being said, I do think there are places that xp_cmdshell works great and if you need to use it, how do you tell if the commands you executed were successful?

For those of you that have worked in command lines, or remember DOS, there is a thing called an Errorlevel, that is returned by programs when they exit. For many of us that used to program in DOS, we always checked ERRORLEVEL when exiting a program, and we made sure that our program always returned a 0 if it exited without an error. That’s a standard that has been in place as long as I can remember working with computers.

How can we use this? If I execute this in a command window:

I get an instance of Notepad on my screen. When the CD.exe application completes, it sets the errorlevel to 0. Technically it returns a 0 to cmd.exe, which sets the errorlevel to that value.

What about this:

In this case, nothing happens. However if I switch the command to:

Then I get notepad again.

How can we use this in SQL Server? When xp_cmdshell exits, it returns the errorlevel from it’s shell. Let’s test it. First, enable xp_cmdshell

-- To allow advanced options to be changed.
EXEC sp_configure 'show advanced options', 1
GO
-- To update the currently configured value for advanced options.
RECONFIGURE
GO
-- To enable the feature.
EXEC sp_configure 'xp_cmdshell', 1
GO
-- To update the currently configured value for this feature.
RECONFIGURE
GO

Now execute

DECLARE @i INT
EXEC @i = xp_cmdshell 'dir'
SELECT @i

This returns the current directory (\Windows\System32 in this case) and a 0.

Now if we change to our other example:

DECLARE @i INT
EXEC @i = xp_cmdshell 'cd tim'
SELECT @i

We get these results

Since that’s not a valid path on my system, the DOS error is returned as a result, and the errorlevel is returned in the variable assignment.

You can use this to test and see if your commands execute before you do something, like try to parse a directory listing that isn’t there.

Career Warfare - Book Review

2010-10-08T04:39:00.000-07:00

I picked up Career Warfare on the recommendation of a friend that had seen the Modern Resume presentation. I grabbed it as an e-book and have been reading it for the last few months, at a fairly slow pace (for me).

I often read a book in a week, but in the case of this one, I would read part of a chapter, and spend a day or so thinking about it. Digesting the information, and seeing how it might be applicable to my career, and my brand.

The author, David D’Alessandro rose to CEO of John Hancock Insurance, and you have to keep that in mind. The book is written as a tool for how you might advance your career in corporate America, and it includes lessons for upper management, many of which don’t apply to most of us. Items like dealing with the press aren’t something the average person needs to think about.

However there is some great advice in there about how you should grow your career, and the impact that you have on your career based on your actions.

I highly recommend it, and there are a couple of great pieces of advice in there. Most importantly, you are always building your brand. Slowly, surely, but every day you go to work, or interact with people professionally, you are building your brand. I like that he stresses honesty and integrity as well.

There are some things I don’t necessarily agree with, like not bringing your spouse to social events, or not drinking at all, but if you are attempting to rise to the C-level ranks, perhaps that’s good advice.

SQLSaturday Advice - Scheduling

2010-10-07T04:41:00.000-07:00

One of the things that I’ve seen cause a few headaches at SQL Saturday events is the scheduling. First, before anyone gets upset, I think the organizers have done a good job, and I haven’t really seen anything wrong with what they’ve done. I just think here’s a little room for improvement.

Easy to Hard

One thing that I noticed at an event earlier this year was a number of sessions that covered the same technology, but at different levels of difficulty. For example, I saw a beginning Powershell and a more advanced Powershell session in the same schedule.

However the advanced session was first, and the beginner one later. That’s fine in a vacuum, but if I’m getting into Powershell, or wondering what it’s about, I’d rather go to the beginner one and then if I want more, I can go to the advanced one later.

So the first piece of advice is to schedule beginner content first, and then more advanced content. I might even try to schedule things back to back if I can, but definitely get beginner content out first.

Big Names

I don’t really consider myself a big name, but a lot of people know who I am, and I think there’s some attractiveness to having me at your event. The same thing goes for Andy Warren (LinkedIn | Blog | @sqlandy), Thomas LaRock(Blog | @sqlrockstar) and a few others.

So,

I would suggest that you look at your list of people, after you’ve scheduled content in order from easy to hard, and then make sure that your out of town people, or your big names, aren’t speaking at the same time. Attendees that are coming because of a few big names will want to see them, so spread them around. Make sure that you have your MVPs, your high profile people spread out so that your audience can go see them.

One Meel-ee-yon Posts

2010-10-06T15:39:00.001-07:00

We crossed the 1,000,000 post mark on SQLServerCentral today and that’s very cool to me. A few others as well since there’s been a “Race to post 1,000,000” thread going for a few weeks.

It’s hard to believe that we’ve reached 1,000,000 posts. On one hand I would have thought we’d have gotten there sooner since we crossed the 1,000,000 visitors a month mark years ago, but most people read and don’t post.

I ran some averages earlier. When I sold the site, we were getting around 400-500 posts a day on most weekdays. Now we’re up over 700 a day and frequently crossing 1000 on busy days.

Very exciting for me.

Speaking Ideas - Plan to End

2010-10-06T09:03:00.000-07:00

Over the years I’ve seen probably hundreds of technical presentations. I’ve seen good ones, bad ones, on all sorts of topics, many of which I didn’t completely understand. However a good speaker still leads me down the path of allowing me to connect the dots, or enjoy the talk, even if I don’t know exactly what he or she is discussing.
One issue that I often encounter, however, is that speakers tend to run up until time is out and don’t leave time for questions, or not enough time. I’ll see the next speaker coming in and waiting, and unsure of how to interrupt. Speakers get rushed, and they try to slip a lot of content in the last 5-10 minutes.
A suggestion that I have is that as a speaker, plan for 45-50 minutes of content for an hour presentation. I think the worry for most speakers is that people are expecting an hour of content and so you have to deliver an hour.
That’s not necessarily true. I know some people might be disappointed in 30 minutes of material, but if you end at 45 minutes and allow 15 minutes for questions, they’ll be satisfied. They’ll learn something, they can ask questions, and if there are no questions, they can go have a few minutes to relax, check email, or network with others before the next session.
Plan to end early. If you have too much material, look to cut things out, or build a second, more advanced presentation that can follow on from this one.

MongoDB

2010-10-05T04:35:00.000-07:00

I found a comparison of MongoDB and SQL Server recently, from a C# MVP and a person that works with SQL Server regularly. It’s an interesting read, and on the surface, you might think that MongoDB is much better than SQL Server in terms of raw performance.

That certainly might be the case, especially for large data loads. MongoDB has the ability to scale out widely, and that always can help with performance. Even in single server environments, I have no doubt that MondDB has less overhead, and likely requires less resources, so it can be faster.

However it also lacks some of the robustness and security that comes with an ACID compliant systems. It’s entirely possible that you could lose work you think you have committed in a MongoDB system. Not likely, but possible.

These are, however, very different products. SQL Server is designed to handle some domains, and some loads very well. MongoDB has other purposes and ideas in it’s design. They aren’t interchangeable in some loads, but for many simpler systems, like web site back ends, they might either work fine.

I like SQL Server, and I think it offers a very rich, and well rounded environment on which to store and work with your data. I’m not sure how MondoDB would fair in some situations, especially those that involve lots of calculations and summarizing of data sets, but it does seem to be a very robust database system for managing documents and scaling widely across servers.

It will be interesting to see in the future of NoSQL systems, like MongoDB, start to become more prevalent in those places where ACID compliance is not critical.

SQL Saturday #53 – Kansas City Wrap Up

2010-10-04T04:05:00.000-07:00

Another weekend, another new city, another SQL Saturday. This was my first trip to Kansas City, and it was a great time, once again, made by the people I met. I also managed to cross two items off my list of things that I have been wanting to do. On Friday, I landed and headed to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, a place that I had hoped to get to for quite a few years, even since I read Only the Ball Was White. It’s a nice walk through the history of a game that I have enjoyed for most of my life.

On Friday night, our hosts, Bill Fellows (blog | @billinkc) and Mike G (blog | @mikesql) had rented a suite at Kauffman Stadium for the Rays v Royals game. I managed to get there just as the game started, removing my hat for the National Anthem and seeing the first pitch. It was a great event for the speakers where I got to see a number of friends from Colorado that had come over (Chris Shaw, Marc Beacom, Jason Horner, Andrew Dykstra, and Carlos Bossy), and spent a bit of time with them as well as a number of other out of town speakers (Wendy Pastrick, Arie Jones, Kevin Boles, Tom LaRock) as well as a few local people that helped organize the event. As is usually the case, the event broke up around 9, with a few people heading to a local amusement park for a roller coaster ride, and the rest of us seeing the game end before heading back to hotels for a little last minute prep.

I rarely sleep well before these events, often worried I might oversleep, but I was a little more relaxed this time. Being just a couple miles from the event center helped, and I got going around 6:30, heading down to the event center, Cerner’s Riverport Campus.

It’s a former casino, Sam’s Town, that was purchased by the Cerner corporation for training and events. MikeSQL had a tour on his blog, which had me looking forward to seeing it in person, and I have to say that I was impressed. There are old restaurants still standing, with nice booths and tables where we enjoyed some great BBQ for lunch, as well as a number of nice, modern, renovated training rooms with good A/V equipment.

The panorama above shows what it would look like when you first came down the stairs into the lobby. The acoustics were a little loud in there for the end of day prize drawing, but otherwise it was a great spot for vendors to setup and people to walk around.

The morning was a little hectic, with name badges and raffle tickets not quite sorted, but the speakers pitched in and we managed to get everything sorted in the lobby. The facility prevented crowds, though it was a little confusing for some people finding a couple of the rooms. Two were separate from the others, and the map wasn’t easy to decode, but there were plenty of volunteers around to help direct people. I also saw Kathi Kellenberger, longtime friend, and her crew that had come over from St. Louis.

I had the first session of I the day, presenting to a small crowd, about 15 people, and I think it went well. There was a gentleman there with his 13 year old daughter, which was impressive. She had a few questions at the end and is hoping to get into Harvard. Being motivated at 13 is a great start and I wish her luck.

I alternated the day with a few sessions and some time talking with people. I caught the Women in Technology lunch panel that discussed how to get younger women interested in technology. Some nice ideas, from the panel, but I’d love to see some 20-somethings giving their opinions as the world has changed quickly in some ways and I wonder how they view the world. I also caught Bill Fellow’s session on CLR, which I’d like to do in Denver, and also caught a bit of Arie Jones’ talk on Resource Governer.

The event ran smoothly, and wrapped up with a number of vendors drawing names from their buckets for prizes, as well as the organizers drawing for absentee vendors. Lunch was good, a BBQ buffet with plenty of food and the extra donated to the City Union Mission. No major snags I saw, though I did hear one speaker left early and missed a second session. The BI track was very popular, which tells me that at least in KC, people really are hungry for knowledge.

The only thing I might look to improve for next year is a little more water/soda for the afternoon as we ran out around 3:30 or so. I might also look to go with only 4 or 5 tracks, and maybe some repeat BI sessions that try to satisfy some needs from the local community. My only other recommendation would be to try to schedule the out of town speakers at different times. Tom LaRock, Karen Lopez, Marc Beacom, Russ Loski, and myself were all speaking at the same time.

I might also move the after event to a closer location, but locating it downtown in the Power and Light District at McFadden’s was interesting. We ended up moving to another, quieter location so that we could talk.

As usual, the people made the event for me. I had great talks with Peter Trast and Karen Lopez during the day, and a late night debating the state of IT workers and motivation with Katie (?) and Carlos Bossy until 11:30. The BBQ was good, although I was sorry that I missed the BBQ crawl among a few places on Friday. I didn’t get enough, and I’m already looking forward to next year.

There are some pictures, and there’s a Twitter daily for the event as well.

Why Read?

2010-10-01T09:45:00.000-07:00

I love to read. Like my friend, Paul Randal (blog, @PaulRandal), I read a lot of books every year, usually over 50. As long as I can remember, I’ve enjoyed reading books, primarily fiction, and it’s been a part of my life that I often look forward to. It’s a joy to see both my boys enjoying reading, and even reading books I’ve recommended. Having my little girl starting to read on her own, and get wrapped up in books and read through them in one sitting makes me smile.

I ran across this link, The Plot Escapes Me, from the NY Times Book Review column, and at first I was surprised. A book reviewer can’t remember plots?

I just recommended The Treasure Hunter to my middle son. That’s a non-fiction book, about someone that hunts for Treasure all over the world as a part of his life, going to different countries for the adventures. Emeralds in South America, sunken ships in the Caribbean, old Indian graves in Central America and Mexico. I read that book as a kid, one of the few non-fiction ones I read multiple times. A friend of the family gave it to me, and I still have it on a bookshelf. I remember two authors, one Robin something, a former Green Beret having toured Vietnam. It’s one of the few hardbacks that I have carried from my youth, through moves and marriage, across the country and back.

I believe that books make us better, they round us out, and they enrich our lives. That’s part of what the author of the New York Times article talks about. We are affected by the books, even if we don’t often remember them. They change our lives, and help us grow.

As I age, I slowly realize that all the classes I didn’t like in college were actually good for me. The philosophy, the chemistry, the other classes that weren’t practical, and I haven’t used in my life, have contributed to who I am, and they have helped me be a more rounded person. I see more in life than just a narrow focus.

I think it’s important to consume arts, whether that’s music, art, literature, or something else. It helps you to grow and expand who you are. It’s one reason that I now mix non-fiction and fiction when I read, trying to grow, trying new things, trying to expand my horizons.

The Land of BBQ

2010-10-01T03:20:00.000-07:00

I’m off to Kansas City today for SQL Saturday #53 and looking forward to a great speaker’s dinner tonight at the Royals game. It should be good catching up with a few people I haven’t seen in some time, as well as 4 other speakers who were at SQL Saturday #52 last weekend in Colorado.

This is my first trip stopping in KC, despite having driving through there 3 or 4 times, and I’m looking forward to some good BBQ, and hopefully time to hit the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, started by the late, great, Buck O’Neil.

If you are in town, or nearby, be sure to come to the event Saturday, and get some great SQL Server training for free. That’s a deal you can’t beat, even if you have to drive an hour or two in order to come.

No Guarantees

2010-09-30T03:54:00.000-07:00

The keynote for SQL Saturday #52 in Denver, that didn’t go as smoothly as I’d like due to technical difficulties, however I am hoping I got my point across. Here’s what I wanted to say:

Who does p90x? Body for Life? Some other exercise routine?

Do you think these programs work? Sure they do. All these programs will work. At least they will work to the extent that you put the effort in to stick to the program. However the exercise is the easy part. It’s the eating program that’s challenging. Changing your eating habits is hard. Very, very hard.

However I’ve heard a number of investment advisors say in the last few years that the best investment you can make for the future is to get healthy. Costs for health care are growing and you don’t want most of your retirement money used on healthcare, but more importantly, you want to enjoy your life. You don’t want to be stuck in a bed or limited in the places you can go. You want to be able to use the money you do have to travel. You want to see and do things, not sit around your house collecting pill bottles or waiting in doctor’s offices.

Mr. Randall, one of the organizers of this event, runs regularly and participates in various races around Denver. I run as well, and in fact, I run every day, though I haven’t done any races. I am not sure I want to show up and one and get dusted by Mr. Randall. I might never hear the end of that.

We both have to work regularly to maintain some level of skill and health for running. I think that having that steady discipline to keep working at running has really helped us. At least I think it has and I hope that it’s paid off with better health. I know I feel better. I’m not here to recommend that you run, but I do think that working to be healthier is a good investment for your future enjoyment of life.

But there is no guarantee that this work on our health will pay off for us. We could have an accident befall us, or we could still have health issues as we get older. If you remember, Jim Fixx was a runner, and wrote the bestselling book “The Complete Book of Running”. He died of a heart attack during his daily run at the age of 52. An autopsy speculated that he was genetically disposed to heart disease and revealed he had severely blocked arteries.

I tell you this not to warn you about running, or make it seem that it doesn’t matter what you do, but to tell you there’s no guarantee that your hard work in trying to stay healthy will work. Just like avoiding all exercise means you definitely won’t enjoy your later years. It could go either way. However there is lots of research, and a good amount of anecdotal evidence, that shows people who continue to take care of themselves as they get older are more likely to be healthy and enjoy life more, and have more opportunities to do things as they age.

All this professional development stuff is the same thing. It requires a bit of a leap of faith that it will work for you. I think it does, and I’d like to think that all the work that you do to build a brand or network with other professionals is an investment. It’s not guaranteed to pay off, but it hedges your bets. It gives you a better chance to succeed, and it should make you more marketable.

The talk I do on branding is designed to give you some practical ways to market yourself, and showcase the work you do. It should help you stand out from the crowd, and hopefully make it easier for you to get a job

The easy part of making yourself more attractive to employers is learning the technology. Picking up Reporting Services or C# or something else is something that each of you can with a little time on a regular basis. My fellow cofounder of the SQL Saturday franchise, Andy Warren, says that you can build a good skill in 100 hours in a year. That’s not an unreasonable level of investment, and probably worth the effort for many of you.

And like my running, it’s the fun part of taking care of your career. You pick a set of skills you need to learn, things that your employer needs or that you want to work on I the next position you take and go for it. You invest a little time, grow your skills, add a line to your resume, and become more like the employee that many managers are looking for.

The hard part, the equivalent to eating, is the other stuff. It’s working on the other skills. For most of us it’s the networking that’s difficult. We struggle to make new contacts in our field and to keep in touch with them.

For some of us it might be the verbal communication skills that we need to develop to make a great impression on someone. Presenting yourself in a positive light, especially in an interview, is hard. Most people are nervous, and they don’t spend enough time practicing these skills. And it shows.

Most of us probably struggle to document our careers. Writing things down, keeping track of our accomplishments, or our failures. Tracking the efforts we’ve made to improve our skills. We usually don’t make a note, and as a result, we often can’t really make the best impression that we might otherwise make if we did. A quick hint, those written communication skills are important. Blogging is an easy way to do this, and it does double duty of tracking your career.

These soft skills are the things we all have to really work on and, like changing our diet, they typically are the harder skills for us to develop.

They are also likely to be just as critical in finding that next job as your technical skills. These days it becomes hard to differentiate yourself just on a list of technical skills, or even in an interview. There are always a group of people that will come across with a similar level of talent, skill and experience. That means that you often have to bond, impress, or otherwise stand out in the interview.

And that’s hard. You might not necessarily develop a strong bond in an hour talk, and often that is all you have to make an impression on the person that will decide if you get the job or not.

You should do everything that you can do to make a better impression beforehand. That could be through blogging, or networking, or something else. If you find the job that you want, the job that’s a good fit for you, don’t you want to be sure you get the interview and you stand out? You do, and to do that, you want to work on your professional brand to give you every chance you have to succeed.

There are no guarantees. Whether it’s exercise, investing your money, or managing your career, nothing will guarantee you a payback. Does that mean it’s not worth doing? Not at all. You hope for the best, plan for the worst. And that means you make an effort to invest for the future, working hard for tomorrow.

But don’t forget to enjoy today while you’re making the effort. Find a hobby, enjoy your significant other, your family, and try to smile every day.

Grabbing SWAG

2010-09-29T07:56:00.001-07:00

It’s getting close to the time for the SQLServerCentral party events this fall, and time to start gathering up SWAG to give to people. In the past, I’ve hosted a SQLServerCentral party at the PASS Summit, and it’s always been a good time. Our first year, 8 years ago, we gave away shirts to people that had registered using our referral code, and it was a madhouse.

Since then, I’ve had more organized events, giving away a polo shirt and a book to each person along with random prizes at the party. This year, I decided to make a change for a few reasons.

First, my budget is down. The contract with PASS this year has me getting lower referrals for people that are repeat attendees. That and fewer people registering for now, mean that I’m going to lose money this year. That’s OK, since it’s a marketing event, but I have to watch the budget closer.

So, I decided to try something new. I went with T-shirts this year, using a big SQLServerCentral logo on the front, ala Superman style. I looked around, and decided to go with DFC Screen Printing, who had a great site and worked with me through email to ensure the artwork was OK. It’s a bit of a leap of faith, but I’m hoping the heavyweight Jerzee’s t-shirts look good.

We still have a book, though it’s a Stumper’s book this year, and not a “Best Of”. Costs all around are higher, so we had to make a decision. We still might do a “Best of” this year, but it won’t be the giveaway for PASS.

I’ll still have other prizes available, and will be gathering up some DVDs, books, and other stuff during October. I won’t be at the party, but Brad will have things under control and it should be a great time.